I was working on some low priority customer problems for a manager. Then all holy heck broke loose. I was getting emails and calls like crazy. The system supporting all our customers was slowing down to a crawl. That should not be possible as we have massive hardware.The DBA team was on hand to monitor what was going on. User row-level locks were in contention. Our applications were hanging. The DBA teams used some tools to identify one of the first locks that happened in the morning. I knew the business logic behind the SQL.
We got in touch with the user. She killed her application that had been hung all morning. This automatically released the locks and the system returned to a normal state. The lead DBA asked us developers to look at the locking strategy used by the application. He recommended a potential redesign of the app. I took a note, then ran off to the next set of emergencies.
