SQL Server 2014 New Defaults

CelebratingToday, April 1st, 2014, marks the release of SQL Server 2014. There are tons and tons of great new methods and functions and processes within the product. We’re all going to be learning about them for quite a while to come. One of the most exciting though is one of the changes to the defaults. In the past there’s been a lot of debate around how best to configure your databases. What cost threshold should be set for parallelism, the max degree of parallelism, memory settings, auto growth, and all sorts of other settings affect how your databases work. But, Microsoft has finally done something smart. They’ve bowed to the pressure of hundreds and hundreds of DBAs, Database Developers and Developers around the world. They’ve finally done the one thing that will improve everyone’s code once and for all. Expect to see massive performance improvements in SQL Server 2014 thanks to this one default change.

What have they done you ask? What miracle is this that is going to result in both better code and better performance? Simple, by default, all connections to the database are now using the transaction isolation level of READ_UNCOMMITTED. In a single stroke, we no longer are forced to put with WITH NOLOCK on every single table reference in every single query. All the pain and suffering caused by blocks from locking has been removed from the product. We can look forward to a much cleaner code base and better query performance. Thanks Microsoft.

Please, note the date carefully.

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