Why is SQL Server 2008 blocking SELECT's on long transaction INSERT's?

Question

We are trying to have a transactional table that only takes new records inserted on a regular basis.

This simple table requires us to continuously add new records to it

Answer 1

this locking behavior is a feature of SQL Server. With 2005 and above, you can use row level versioning (which is what is used by default on Oracle) to achieve the same result & not block your selects. This puts extra strain on tempdb because tempdb maintains the row level versioning, so make sure you accommodate for this. To make SQL behave the way you want it to, run this:

ALTER DATABASE MyDatabase
SET ALLOW_SNAPSHOT_ISOLATION ON

ALTER DATABASE MyDatabase
SET READ_COMMITTED_SNAPSHOT ON