SQL Server has a new feature that’s currently only available in Azure SQL Database: Optimized Locking. This capability reduces lock contention by optimizing how locks are acquired and released, potentially improving concurrency for workloads with many concurrent transactions.

It’s a very interesting capability that looks like it could potentially be a great fit for all sorts of SQL Server implementations in the future.

This is a very interesting capability that looks like it could potentially be a great fit for all sorts of SQL Server implementations in the future. (No insider knowledge here, I just haven’t read about any constraints that mean this couldn’t work well on-prem or in a managed instance if/when Microsoft wants to make it more widely available.)

Here’s a visualization of the concepts involved in Optimized Locking: