SQL Server 2016’s Query Store feature promises to be better than Plan Guides ever were. The Query Store lets you track query performance, collect execution plans, and force a specific plan if you notice that a query is sometimes fast, and sometimes slow.
Sometimes when SQL Server gets slow, developers and DBAs find that the problem is blocking. After lots of work to identify the query or queries which are the blockers, frequently one idea is to add ROWLOCK hints to the queries to solve the problem or to disable PAGE locks on the table. This often backfires - here’s why.
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