How to create, find and eliminate deadlocks

Deadlocks are typically encountered in high-load scenarios or in complex concurrent transactions. And the worst part is, you probably won’t see them until you’re live in production. Luckily, finding and solving deadlock issues isn’t as complicated as it may sound. All it takes is a bit of logging and patience, along with some basic know-how of how locking mechanisms work in SQL Server.

Introduction to DML triggers

A trigger is like a stored procedure that automatically (and atomically) executes on a given condition, for instance when you insert a record into a table. Used properly, this is a powerful tool to enforce business rules, perform automated calculations, log changes, and more. But triggers also come with some potential pitfalls.

Indexing basics

Understanding indexes in SQL Server can help you build much more efficient database solutions. Often, performance problems can be adressed with indexes, so knowing how indexes work and how to set them up for the best performance are a great asset in your optimization work.

APPLY tutorial

The APPLY operator can be a bit confusing, but if you master how it works, you can do great things with it. It is similar to a JOIN (hence the confusion), but differs in one key area: The JOIN defines a relation between two datasets using the ON keyword, whereas APPLY does not.