Why My MSSQL DBA Wont Stop Griping About NOLOCK / Entity Framework / etc

Rick Lowe

In the SQL Server community there are a handful of heated debates that go back to the last millennium and and yet are still active today. DBAs by and large have not given up complaining when they NOLOCK hints for example, but among some (most certainly not all) development teams they continue to appear. The announcement of LINQ was greeted with excitement and enthusiasm by many developers (including the speaker) but largely fell flat with the DBA community. And most of us can think of many more examples to add to this list.

For many of these debates, part of the issue is that it is possible to write code that passes regression and integration testing, and even a reasonable effort at load testing, but will not perform as expected in production. When this happens, it can be difficult for all of the parties involved to find enough common ground to be able to communicate exactly what went wrong.

During this session, we will work though a series of demos and explanations of results to see exactly why some of these hot button development practices really can be more problematic than one may suspect at first glance.