Why I Love NOLOCK Hints In SQL Server (Video Edition)

Oh, Just Do it.


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6 thoughts on “Why I Love NOLOCK Hints In SQL Server (Video Edition)

  1. Interwebs Quote of the Day: “no one listens to you until they’re paying you”. Preach it, Brother Erik!

    True story. A company I worked at paid a vendor over 20K for a report of performance suggestions. They basically added a few screen shots on the report I gave them.

    When I brought it up I was told that the upper damagement will listen to the vendor because they paid for it. I quickly checked my online bank account and verified I was still getting paid. It was pretty scary for a minute or so. I still get douche chills thinking about it.

    1. HAHAHA, yeah, that’s the funny thing out here in consultant land. Of course, some people pay me for advice and then don’t follow any of it, and pay me again for the same advice.

      Not that I mind.

  2. I work for a company that sells private jet service, and have spent the last 9 years eliminating NOLOCK hints from the prior 15 years of legacy code. Sorry about that. You could have done a direct trade of consulting for the private jet service you covet… except for my heroic efforts. By the way, about 0.1% of the time I find that eliminating a NOLOCK hint results in a deadlock that has to be fixed through additional heroic efforts. Learning to love the “Allow SNAPSHOT Isolation” database setting for fixing some deadlocks when improved indexing and refactoring don’t work (it’s probably too late to try full RCSI here, what with all this legacy code and the possibility of race conditions).

  3. I see “no lock” being blindly added to every query at my workplace, reason being best practice 🙂
    And several other such things, async calls for sync operations being made all over the place, it is ridiculously bad

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