Handle locks when stored procedure is executed concurrently in SQL Server - sql-server

I have a stored procedure written in SQL Server which has some logic derived by joining various tables in the database and finally the end result is inserted into a table.
This stored procedure is being called from front end using .Net application api by various users .
If only one user is performing some operation, it's taking some 20 seconds to complete the operation.
If multiple users are performing the operation, then it's hanging and taking almost more than 20 mins to complete.
I have tried to understand the locks getting backend and tried to set hints WITH(NOLOCK) and some other options but not able to resolve it.
How to handle the locks effectively when concurrent execution is happening?

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SQL Server SPIDS go into a sleeping state and never recover

I have a long running stored procedure that is executed from IIS. On average this stored procedure takes between two and five minutes to complete because it is searching through a large dataset. (although it has take around 20 minutes in some cases)
Most of the time the stored procedure works fine but every now and then the SPIDS go into a sleeping state and never recover. The only solution I have found is to restart the SQL Server and re-run the stored procedure
The are no table inserts in the proc (only table variable inserts), and the other statements are selects on a large table.
I'm stuck for where to start debugging this issue. Any hints one what it might be or suggestions on tools that would help me find the issue would be most helpful
EDIT: More info added:
The actual issue is the proc doesn't return the resultset. My first thought was to look at the spids, they were sleeping but the cputime was still increasing
It's a .Net app so .Net Core 3.1 with ASP.NET Core and a Blazor UI. The libary used for db connection is System.data.SqlClient I believe System.data.SqlClient uses it's own custom driver. Calling code below:
The stored procedure doesn't return multiple result sets, however obviously different instances of the proc run at the same time.
No limits to connection pooling in IIS
#RichardWatts when you say " re-run the stored procedure" you mean that the same stored proc with the same parameter and data works once you restart SQL Server ?
If so look over your loc (sp_loc} inside your table probably another process loc some data and doesnt release it properly, specialy if you have transaction accessing the same tables.
What is your your isolation level on your connexion ? If you can, try to change it to READ UNCOMMITTED to see if that solve your problem.
as an alternate you can also add a WITH (NOLOCK) or (READUNCOMMITTED) to your sql command.
Know that you will need to hold query with a read uncommited or nolock if you have some modification on the structure of your table or index re construction for example or they will in turn block its execution
Nevertheless be cautious this solution depend on your environment, specially if your tables gots lots of update, delete, insert,... this kind of isolation can lead to a Dirty read and doesnt adress the root cause of your problem wich I would bet is uncomited transaction (good article that explain it)
Make also a DBCC CHECKTABLE just to be sure on this side

Stored procedure and trigger execution blocking

I have SQL Server 2017 Express database that is accessed by up to 6 tablets that connect via an Angular 7 app using REST web services.
I have a stored procedure that allows a new user to be inserted into a specific database table. The insert will always only insert 1 record at a time, but with 6 clients, the stored procedure could be called by each client almost simultaneously.
The last step of the process is to print an agreement form to a specific printer. Initially this was going to be handled on the client side, but the tablets do not have the ability to print to a network printer, so that functionality now needs to reside on the server side.
With this new requirement, the agreement form is an RTF document that is being read, placeholder values replaced with values from the insert statement, written to a temporary file and then printed to the network printer via the application (Wordpad most likely) that is associated with the RTF file format.
There is also an MS Access front-end app that uses linked servers to connect to the database, but doesn't have the ability to create new users, but will need to be able to initiate the "print agreement" operation in the case of an agreement not being printed due to printer issue, network issue, etc.
I have the C# code written to perform the action of reading/modifying/writing/printing of the form that uses the UseShellExecute StartInfo property with the Process.Start method.
Since the file read/modify/write/print process takes a few seconds, I am concerned about having the stored procedure for adding the registration blocking for that length of time.
I am pretty sure that I am going to need a CLR stored procedure so that the MS Access front-end can initiate the print operation, so what I have come up with is either the "Add_Registration" stored procedure (Transact-SQL) will call the CLR stored procedure to do the read/modify/write/print operation, or an insert trigger (either CLR or Transact-SQL) on the table that calls the CLR stored procedure to read/modify/write/print.
I could avoid the call from the trigger to the stored procedure by duplicating the code in both the CLR trigger and the CLR stored procedure if there is a compelling reason to do so, but was trying to avoid having duplicate code if possible.
The solutions that I am currently considering are as follows, but am unsure of how SQL Server handles various scenarios:
A CLR or Transact-SQL Insert trigger on the registration table that calls a CLR stored procedure that does the reading/modifying/writing/printing process.
A CLR stored procedure that does the reading/modifying/writing/printing process, being called from the current add_registration Transact-SQL stored procedure
The questions I keep coming back to are:
How are Insert CLR triggers executed if multiple inserts are done at the same or nearly the same time (only 1 per operation), are they queued up an then processed synchronously or are they executed immediately?
Same question as #1 except with a Transact-SQL trigger
How are CLR stored procedures handled if they are called by multiple clients at the same or nearly the same time, are they queued up an then processed synchronously, or is each call to the stored procedure executed immediately?
Same question as #3 except with a Transact-SQL stored procedure
If a CLR stored procedure is called from a Transact-SQL trigger, is the trigger blocked until the stored procedure returns or is the call to the stored procedure spawned out to it's own process (or similar method) with the trigger returning immediately?
Same question as #5 except with a CLR trigger calling the CLR stored procedure
I am looking for any other suggestions and/or clarifications on how SQL Server handles these scenarios.
There is no queuing unless you implement it yourself, and there are a few ways to do that. So for multiple concurrent sessions, they are all acting independently. Of course, when it comes to writing to the DB (INSERT / UPDATE / DELETE / etc) then they clearly operate in the order in which they submit their requests.
I'm not sure why you are including the trigger in any of this, but as it relates to concurrency, triggers execute within a system-generated transaction initiated by the DML statement that fired the trigger. This doesn't mean that you will have single-threaded INSERTs, but if the trigger is calling a SQLCLR stored procedure that takes a second or two to complete (and the trigger cannot continue until the stored procedure completes / exits) then there are locks being held on the table for the duration of that operation. Those locks might not prevent other sessions from inserting at the same time, but you might have other operations attempting to modify that table that require a conflicting lock that will need to wait until the insert + trigger + SQLCLR proc operation completes. Of course, that might only be a problem if you have frequent inserts, but that depends on how often you expect new users, and that might not be frequent enough to worry about.
I'm also not sure why you need to print anything in that moment. It might be much simpler on a few levels if you simply have a flag / BIT column indicating whether or not the agreement has been printed, defaulted to 0. Then, you can have an external console app, scheduled via SQL Server Agent or Windows Scheduled Tasks, executed once every few minutes, that reads from the Users table WHERE HasPrintedAgreement = 0. Each row has the necessary fields for the replacement values, it prints each one, and upon printing, it updates that UserID setting HasPrintedAgreement = 1. You can even schedule this console app to execute once every minute if you always want the agreements immediately.

SQL Server Pulling Records Out of a Table Being Continually Updated

I have a table in SQL Server 2012 that's being used by a service that's continually updating records within the table. It's sort of a queue where the service processes the records, and then periodically I run another stored procedure to pull out the ones that are processed into another table. Records in this table start out in one status and as they're processed they get put into another status.
When I try to run the stored procedure to pull the completed records out, I'm running into a deadlocking issue if it happens to occur when the running process is updating the table, which happens about every 2 minutes. I thought about just using a NOLOCK hint to eliminate that, but after reading a bit on this SO thread, I'm thinking I should avoid NOLOCK whenever possible.
GOAL:
Allow the service to continue running as usual, but also allow another stored procedure to periodically go in and remove records that are completed. In the event that there's a lock on a given row, I'd like to just leave that row alone and pick it up on the next time I run the stored procedure. During the processing, there's no requirement that I get all the rows with the stored procedure. That only matters once all the records have been processed, at which point I need to ensure that I get all the records, all while having the service still running on other unrelated records, and not causing any deadlocking issues. Hopefully this makes sense.
This article seems to suggest REPEATABLE READ
Am I on the right track or is there a better method?

Two simultaneous rollbacks deadlocking tables

Accidentally the same stored procedure was run twice at one time on our MS SQL Server 2008 R2. They were run from the same SQL Server Management Studio client and I tried to cancel them both. After 45 minutes neither process has cancelled. I read somewhere that it would help to close the query windows in SSMS so I did. However the tables the stored procedure should be writing to is still locked even though almost 20 hours has passed. I guess there is a deadlock. I hit cancel seconds after the stored procedure was initiated.
The table the stored procedure is reading from is not locked. The stored procedure is in CLR. It reads from a table, manipulate data and then use SqlBulkCopy to insert into three other tables.
The data in the tables the SP writes to can very easily be recreated. However I can neither drop nor truncate them due to the lock. I also tried KILL SPID with no result.
I have been thinking about restarting the server, but I guess it would not help because of SQL Servers data integrity.
I would really like some input on how release the lock. Several websites with lots of users depend on the database server so solutions that do not involve restarting would be much appreciated.

sql query notification service issue

We are getting timeout issues on our databases. So I trurned on SQL Server Profiler and see SQLQueryNotificationService running every second with long duration. I checked the Service Broker and there are bunch of SQLQueryNotificationService queues created. I don't think we created any of these queues also there are bunch of stored procedures like these SqlQueryNotificationStoredProcedure-15c5b84b-42b0-4cfb-9707-9b1697f44127. Could you please let me know how to drop them? If I drop them is there any impact on the database? Please let me know. I appreciate any suggestions.
Do you have an ASP.Net web site running or another application that creates Sql Server Cache dependencies? It is Sql Server Service Broker queues, it executes that WAITFOR ... statement which waits for around one minute (60000 msecs), then executes again next second. Shouldn't normally cause problems, it shouldn't block or delay your "normal" queries or stored procedures.
However, I saw it causing issues for me once - one of the stored procedures, when executed from the same web application that established the cache dependency, did timeout (or rather came back in 120 secs which is not acceptable). Exactly the same stored procedure, executed under the same account with same parameters, but from Management Studio, ran fine without any issues. It was SQL Server 2005 SP4.
SQL Profiler showed that in the middle of execution of my stored procedure (and always after the same INSERT INTO ... statement), its execution was interrupted and instead of its statement there was that WAIT FOR .... from Sql Query Notification, completed in one minute, then another WAIT FOR... starting and again, completed in 59 secs - and only after that the Profiler showed me my stored procedure completed. With the duration of 119000, which is almost exactly two minutes.
It was if that query notifications were joining the transaction within my stored procedure.
What helped: recompiled the offending stored procedure. I simply changed its script, did ALTER statement with some minor syntax changes. No problems after that.

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