Troubleshooting Blocking and Deadlocks for Beginners (2 hours 10 minutes)

Your SQL Server is slow, and you suspect blocking.

Try the course quizzes anytime: blocking diagnosis, troubleshooting retroactively, deadlocks

You need to prove if blocking really is the culprit and set up simple, lightweight monitoring using free tools and scripts to find the queries causing your blocking problems.

This practical course teaches you to fight blocking and deadlocks

Learn to tackle blocking problems strategically, understand the different DMVs that report lock waits – and when they update with lock information, get demo scripts to practice implementing solutions yourself, and take quizzes to test your knowledge along the way.

Get the scripts

https://github.com/LitKnd/SQLWorkbooks/tree/main/troubleshooting_blocking_and_deadlocks_for_beginners

Each video in this course has English captions available, plus a transcript below the video.

Lessons

Get ready to fight some blocking (2 minutes)

The story of the repeat blocker (4 minutes)

Diagnose blocking, configure alerts, and troubleshoot blocking live with sp_WhoIsActive (13 minutes)

Avoid an anti-pattern and decode the blocking pattern (13 minutes)

Get to the root cause of this blocking pattern (13 minutes)

Quiz on blocking diagnosis

We need more tools to catch the 'sneaky blocker' (2 minutes)

Configure the Blocked Process Report (7 minutes)

Run a load test, then analyze the Blocked Process Report (16 minutes)

Strategies to tackle 'sneaky blocker' situations (6 minutes)

Quiz on troubleshooting blocking retroactively

The problem with deadlocks (1 minute)

Create and capture a deadlock (9 minutes)

Analyze the deadlock graph and take the deadlock challenge (5 minutes)

Solve the deadlock challenge (5 minutes)

Strategies to prevent deadlocks (9 minutes)

Quiz on deadlocks

Interview Question #1 (4 minutes)

Interview Question #2 (4 minutes)

Interview Question #3 (6 minutes)

Interview Question #4 (2 minutes)

Interview Question #5 (3 minutes)

Survey the tools we covered and outline your learning plan (3 minutes)