On Jan 27, 2005, at 12:02 PM, Brian Hirt wrote:

> Now, even something as simple as dropping an unused index fails with a 
> deadlock.  I typically have to run a script about 30 or 40 times at 
> before it works (at our lowest usage point).  The thing that is really 
> annoying is that it's causing other application processes to die from 
> a deadlocks when i attempt to run the scripts, causing errors for our 
> users, aborted reports, etc.  Our applications don't handle deadlocks

Yep.. seen it here too.  Luckily, I can usually isolate the other 
processes accessing the particular table I need to alter and stop them 
for a few minutes until the script runs.

In general it is a big problem.  I'm not exactly sure what is causing 
the deadlocks, since the processes in question are not running any long 
transactions.  At least my system is resilient to transactions failing 
-- that was a bit PITA to build into the apps.