(The Curious Case of… used to be part of our bi-weekly newsletter but we decided to make it a regular blog post instead so it can sometimes be more frequent. It covers something interesting one of us encountered when working with a client, doing some testing, or were asked in a random question from the community.)
I had a comment on my blog a few weeks ago from someone who hadn’t known that online index operations acquire blocking table locks – yes they do!
When I’m teaching the index fragmentation module of our IEPTO1 class, I like to joke that the marketing team back in 2005 called them ‘online index operations’ because ‘almost online index operations’ wasn’t a good marketing term :-)
Using an online index rebuild as an example, here are the basic operations that happen:
- Acquire a table S (Share) lock. This makes sure that there are no open transactions making changes to the table. This is necessary because the next step is to…
- Create the empty new index and start a versioning scan of the old index. It doesn’t enable snapshot isolation, but it uses the same underlying mechanism to preserve a point-in-time view (for want of a better word) of the old index.
- Cause all query plans that affect the old index to recompile, so changes are made to both the old and the new index.
- Downgrade the table S lock to an IS (Intent-Share) lock, which remains in place for the duration of the operation. This allows read and writes to the table.
- Populate the new index. Any changes to the old index are also made to the new index, with logic in place to cope with pathological problems.
- Acquire a table Sch-M (Schema Modification) lock, which is not compatible with any other lock, so no readers or writers can be active on the table.
- Swap the new index for the old one, queue the old index for deferred drop, recompile all query plans.
- Drop the table lock
So you can see there are two points at which an online operation must acquire a table lock that could cause blocking. This can be mitigated somewhat from SQL Server 2014 onward using the WAIT_AT_LOW_PRIORITY option, but it’s still a necessity.
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