Question

Is it possible to somehow execute a query against a table during debugging of T-SQL statement? It’s locked for another connections at the time, so using another windows doesn’t help.

I’m trying to debug an INSTEAD OF UPDATE trigger, something isn’t working as expected and I’d like to evaluate another SQL expression to investigate.

I think that I maybe could write a cursor that will loop the table and print the information I need, but I’d rather avoid that and use something simpler.

Answer 1

SET TRANSACTION ISOLATION LEVEL READ UNCOMMITTED;
SELECT ..
  FROM ..

OR

SET TRANSACTION ISOLATION LEVEL READ SNAPSHOT;
SELECT ..
  FROM ..

Have a look at the Transaction Isolation levels here.
The first will allows access to ‘dirty’ uncommitted data whereas the second will skip uncommitted data. However neither will see data in the INSTEAD OF UPDATE trigger, since that hasn’t even hit the table.