Transaction (Process ID ) was deadlocked on lock resources with another process and has been chosen

You had written update or delete statements without SQL hints like nolock, updlock, readpast etc.

This is very bad practice when you are dealing with multiple udates on rows or tables without locks.

Below scenario will explain how to use those hints to avoid deadlocks aswell as concurrency issues.

e.g.

UPDATE top 10 xyzTable with (updlock)

set x = 1

In this case if second user comes in to update xyzTable, he has to wait for first user operation to finish.

To let second user do update on next top 10 rows which are not locked by first user, you can

modify above query using readpast hint.

ReadPast hint will return row sets which are not locked by any transaction in that contxt.

UPDATE top 10 xyzTable with (updlock,readpast)

set x = 1

ReadPast and NoLock are two different hints

Readpast Only return rows which are not locked, while nolock returns

commited as well as non commited rows by other transaction this is also called as dirty reads.

SP_LOCK will written locks details.

You can avoid concurrency issues with your transaction using those lock hints.

For more information about locks in MS SQL you can visit

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa213026(SQL.80).aspx