The Impact of Blocking in Database

Week 4 Discussion 1: Blockers!
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Week 4 Discussion 1: Blockers!
I once had a customer who was experiencing blocking in the database. The client was frustrated by the lock contention issue and was impatient to investigate and debug the problem immediately. However, the trouble was identifying the particular cause of the locking problem. I initially blamed the database system and focused on identifying issues with server-side tuning. Unfortunately, my decision to pay attention only to the database did not result in any resolution and only absorbed my energy and time that would have been better directed at investigating the client application and the queries it submitted. The customer was livid after an hour of troubleshooting, yet the blocking problem had not been resolved. He felt undervalued and implied that I was not doing enough to control the situation even after explaining that he was on a time-pressing task. Although I took his frustrations seriously and tried not to be offended by his rather insensitive remarks, I could not seem to detect what the problem really was.
I reached out to a colleague who gently hinted that I should instead look for issues in the client application and submitted queries. I was relieved to learn that the blocking problem resulted from one session holding a lock on a particular resource, preventing Service Profile IDentifier (SPID) efforts to obtain a differing lock category on the same resource. Although the time frame for which the first SPID holds the resource is typically small, the second connection could not be permitted to obtain its own lock until the owning session stopped holding the same. Th...