No, not NOLOCK. You get the wrong query results, even when your query results aren’t supposed to be changing.
I’m talking about when you need to do writes, but you want your query to get along with others in high concurrency environments, without creating a blocking firestorm.
SET LOCK_TIMEOUT 1000 – if you run this before your query starts, SQL Server will wait patiently for X milliseconds before giving up and aborting your own query. This is useful when a lot of short queries are running all the time, and I don’t want to give up instantly – but I do