Deadlocks used to scare me.

I’d get the alert from a monitoring tool, and I’d look around to see if anyone was watching me. If the coast was clear, I’d… delete the notification.

Deadlocks were a mystery to me because I didn’t know how I was supposed to fix them. Sometimes the same queries could cooperate, and sometimes they couldn’t? The database server decided which one could pass, and which one would fail? What was I supposed to do about any of that? Besides, most of the time it wasn’t a problem – apps retried their queries, or users just ignored error messages and tried the process again.

But eventually, when I became a consultant, I had to confront my ignorance head-on and do something about it because some clients were having serious deadlock issues that they couldn’t ignore. I got help from smart people like Kendra Little, Erik Darling, and Jeremiah Peschka. I solved those client issues, claimed victory, and today deadlocks don’t scare me at all.

You can solve deadlocks in (at least) 3 ways:

• Having enough indexes to make your queries go fast, but not so many that they cause problems for inserts, updates, & deletes
• Using the right isolation level for your app’s needs, which typically isn’t the default – it’s RCSI
• Or worst case, tuning your queries

I say worst case because tuning your queries is usually the most labor-intensive option. It requires knowing the queries involved in the deadlocks, being able to understand what about them is causing a problem, and knowing how to rewrite/reorder them in a way that’ll avoid deadlocks.

In this free session on April 29th sponsored by Idera, I’ll show you why your queries need to work through tables in a consistent order while minimizing the number of times you touch a table. I’ll use a real-world deadlock example and rewrite the query to resolve the issue. Whether you’re a DBA or developer, you’ll walk away with practical strategies you can apply immediately to make your queries deadlock-resistant and your applications more resilient.

If you can’t make it live, Idera will email registrants the recording later to watch on their own time. See you there!