Question

In our current project we are interfacing with a third party data provider.
They need to insert data in a table of ours. This inserting can be frequent every 1 min, every 5min, every 30, depends on the amount of new data they need to provide. The use the isolation level read committed. On our end we have an application, windows service, that calls a webservice every 2 minutes to see if there is new data in this table. Our isolation level is repeatable read. We retrieve the records and update a column on these rows.

Now the problem is that sometimes this third party provider needs to insert a lot of data, let’s say 5000 records. They do this per transaction (5rows per transaction), but they don’t close the connection. They do one transaction and then the next untill all records are inserted. This caused issues for our process, we receive a timeout.

If this goes on for a long time the database get’s completely unstable. For instance, they maybe stopped, but the table somehow still stays unavailable. When I try to do a select on the table, I get several records but at a certain moment I don’t get any response anymore. It just says retrieving data but nothing comes anymore until I get a timeout exception.

Only solution is to restart the database and then I see the other records.

How can we solve this. What is the ideal isolation level setting in this scenario?

Answer 1

perhaps you can create a staging table that the third party data provider can write into. You can then write your own routine to pull data from there into your actual table, using a method of your choosing that better works for your application.

EDIT based on OP’s comment

in your question you say

Now the problem is that sometimes this
third party provider needs to insert a
lot of data, let’s say 5000 records.
They do this per transaction (5rows
per transaction), but they don’t close
the connection. They do one
transaction and then the next untill
all records are inserted. This caused
issues for our process, we receive a
timeout.

Which indicates that you have identified the problem as how the third party data provider inserts the data, and implies that you are helpless to change it. My suggestion to have them insert into a staging table frees your application for any locking and/or blocking caused by the third party data provider. You would then be free to include the data into your application using any isolation level, any number of rows at a time, any time or a specific time, etc.

However, I’m puzzled how inserting new rows into a table causes your application to lock up. If it is locking/blocking why would your application be reading those new rows while they are being inserted anyway? Are you inserting using a clustered index with rows going into the middle of the table? Is your application doing table scan selects in a transaction? there must be something else going on.

when you system starts to die try this, it will show you what is causing the block:

;with Blockers AS
(SELECT
     r.session_id AS spid
         ,r.cpu_time,r.reads,r.writes,r.logical_reads 
         ,r.blocking_session_id AS BlockingSPID
         ,LEFT(OBJECT_NAME(st.objectid, st.dbid),50) AS ShortObjectName
         ,LEFT(DB_NAME(r.database_id),50) AS DatabaseName
         ,s.program_name
         ,s.login_name
         ,OBJECT_NAME(st.objectid, st.dbid) AS ObjectName
         ,SUBSTRING(st.text, (r.statement_start_offset/2)+1,( (CASE r.statement_end_offset
                                                                   WHEN -1 THEN DATALENGTH(st.text)
                                                                   ELSE r.statement_end_offset
                                                               END - r.statement_start_offset
                                                              )/2
                                                            ) + 1
                   ) AS SQLText
     FROM sys.dm_exec_requests                          r
         JOIN sys.dm_exec_sessions                      s ON r.session_id = s.session_id
         CROSS APPLY sys.dm_exec_sql_text (sql_handle) st
     --WHERE r.session_id > 50
)
SELECT Blockers.* FROM Blockers