Deadlocks used to scare me.
I’d get the alert from a monitoring tool, and I’d look around to see if anyone was watching me. If the coast was clear, I’d… delete the notification.
Deadlocks were a mystery to me because I didn’t know how I was supposed to fix them. Sometimes the same queries could cooperate, and sometimes they couldn’t? The database server decided which one could pass, and which one would fail? What was I supposed to do about any of that? Besides, most of the time it wasn’t a problem – apps retried their queries, or users just