My understanding of deadlocks is - two processes trying to contend for same resource - typically two processes trying to \'write\' to same row of data. If all one process is doi
ReadComitted Transaction Isolation Level initially obtains a Shared Lock
on a resource i.e while reading the row but when we try to UPDATE the row it obtains an Exclusive lock
on the resources. Multiple user can have shared locks on same rows and it wont effect but as soon as One user tries to update a row It gets an Exclusive Lock on the row which can result in A dead lock
when a user who could initially see the record because of the shared locks on the row but now when the user tries to update it It already has an exclusive lock on it by the 1st user. Imagine a scenario where User1 and User2 Both has shared locks and when they try to update some records they both get Exclusive locks on the rows which other user need to commit the transaction. this will result in a DEAD LOCK.
In case of a DeadLock if the Priority Level is not set
SQL Server will wait for sometime and then it will RollBack
the transaction which is cheaper
to rollback.
Edit
Yes if User1 is only reading data and User2 trys to Update some data and there a non-clustered index on that table, it is possible.
1) User1 is reading Some Data and obtains a shared lock on the non-clustered index in order to perform a lookup, and then tries to obtain a shared lock on the page contianing the data in order to return the data itself.
2) User2 who is writing/Updating first obtains an exlusive lock on the database page containing the data, and then attempts to obtain an exclusive lock on the index in order to update the index.