I'm currently experiencing issue with a .Net application with a SQL Server back-end.
The application generates inventory via a database transaction with requirements of up to 4 a second in peak periods. The transaction basically writes to 2 transaction table to record the events which in turn updates/inserts into inventory state objects in 2 inventory tables (various inventory levels).
At the same time we are required to provide production reporting of items created per day, items created in the last hour etc.
We are currently experiencing blocking (leading to timeouts) while reports are being run. After much trawling the internet we have band-aided the issue with query hints for WITH (NOLOCK) for the hot spot tables.
For now we have a fix, but what would better approach to do away with the NOLOCK hints?
How do people deal with reporting on transactional systems?