Guru's Guide to SQL Server Architecture and Internals, The

Thread Synchronization

When you get beyond the simplicity of single-threaded applications and begin to explore the world of multithreaded programming, one of the first things you discover is the need to synchronize the activities of the threads in your application. Allowing one thread to modify a global variable while another is using it to control flow logic is a recipe for erratic application behavior and possibly even an access violation. The fact that multiple threads can truly execute simultaneously on multiprocessor machines does not mean that you literally want all of them running all of the time. There are times when you need one thread to wait on others to finish what they're doing before proceeding. There are times when you need to ...