A Night of Optimism...about Optimized Locking

Welcome to our July 2026 meeting! We'll be featuring the session “Exploring Optimized Locking in SQL Server 2025" and John Morehouse from DCAC will be our presenter. John is coming in from Virginia to speak and is an in-demand speaker worldwide, so it's great to have him in Lexington! As always, we'll have food and drinks courtesy of TEKsystems Lexington and use of a great facility courtesy of Awesome Inc. We'll have another Amazon gift card giveaway courtesy of Devart, too! John's session abstract: When updating data in SQL Server, operators run the gambit of incurring issues if not done correctly. Sometimes, they manifested as lock escalation, the dreaded blocking, disastrous deadlocks, or poor performance. With the release of Optimized Locking, first seen in Azure SQL Database and now in SQL Server 2025, issues are mitigated while helping to enhance performance and transactional concurrency. In this session, we'll embark on a journey into this new capability, designed to revolutionize concurrency control and improve transaction throughput. We'll examine the underlying mechanism while providing insights into its architecture, implementation, and best practices for maximizing performance. You will - • Learn how optimized locking works • Discover what it requires to function • Some Gotchas to be aware of Whether you're a seasoned database professional or a curious developer, this session offers a more profound understanding of SQL Server's optimized locking feature.