Today, Jeff Atwood posted about a deadlock issue he was having. He had a couple of ideas as to how to solve his issue, including the nolock statement. What I found most interesting were the comments that followed. Here is a summary:

• SQL Server sucks
• NoLock is ok
• NoLock is a hack
• I can’t believe you don’t/didn’t know how to fix a dead lock

I can’t believe how critical people were of Jeff. I guess I was a little surprised that the author of the great Coding Horror didn’t know the answer to something, but that’s no reason to be critical of the guy.

A couple of the more decent links included:

• http://weblogs.sqlteam.com/mladenp/archive/2008/07/18/Immediate-deadlock-notifications-without-changing-existing-code.aspx
• http://developmenttips.blogspot.com/2008/08/cure-for-deadlocked-learning-to-use.html

We have a couple of deadlock issues in our current database that I’d like to sit down and fix, so these might come in handy.

Update: Someone who knows allot more about SQL posted a blog entry in response to Jeff’s original post. The author believes that using nolock is never a good idea and goes on to give some advice on how to start solving deadlock issues.