Last Page Locks on Heaps

Reports locking attempts on the last page of a partitioned or unpartitioned heap table. It only reports on allpages-locked tables.

This information can indicate whether there are tables in the system that would benefit from using data-only-locking from partitioning, or from increasing the number of partitions. Adding a clustered index that distributes inserts randomly across the data pages may also help. If you know that one or more tables is experiencing a problem with contention for the last page, the monitoring tables can help determine which table is experiencing the problem. See the Performance and Tuning Series: Monitoring Tables.

See Chapter 1, “Controlling Physical Data Placement,” in Performance and Tuning Series: Physical Database Tuning for information on how partitions can help solve the problem of last-page locking on unpartitioned heap tables.