How can blocking be reduced?

Blocking can often be reduced by keeping transactions short, accessing only required rows, creating appropriate indexes, avoiding unnecessary user interaction inside transactions, committing promptly, and using appropriate isolation strategies.

Row-versioning options such as READ_COMMITTED_SNAPSHOT can reduce reader-writer blocking for many workloads, but they change concurrency behavior and increase version-store usage. They should be evaluated deliberately rather than enabled solely as a quick fix.

Application retry policies may help with transient concurrency failures, but they do not replace fixing persistent blocking causes.