Not once does he even mention looking at the query plan. SQL server will tell you exeactly what it's doing to run a query, and from that you can tell what's blo

Not once does he even mention looking at the query plan. SQL server will tell you exeactly what it's doing to run a query, and from that you can tell what's blocking. My guess is the update is trying to update an index the select wants to use. Updates that span two pages can give rise to deadlocks like this, where the select has a read lock on one page, and the update has an x-lock on the other. None of this is magical.