How do you lock tables in SQL Server 2005, and should I even do it?

Question

This one will take some explaining. What I\'ve done is create a specific custom message queue in SQL Server 2005. I have a table with messages that contain timestamps for both a

Answer 1

@Kilhoffer:

The whole SQL batch is parsed before execution, so SQL knows that you're going to do an update to the table as well as select from it.

Edit: Also, SQL will not necessarily lock the whole table - it could just lock the necessary rows. See here for an overview of locking in SQL server.