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

Going Preemptive

Certain operations within SQL Server require that a worker “go preemptive”—that is, that it be taken off of the scheduler. An example is a call to an extended procedure. As I've said, because UMS is a cooperative multitasking environment, it relies on workers to yield at regular points within the code in order to keep the server running smoothly. Obviously, it has no idea of whether an xproc can or will yield at any sort of regular interval, and, in fact, there's no documented ODS API function that an xproc could call to do so. So, the scheduler assumes that an xproc requires its own thread on which to run. Therefore, prior to a worker executing an xproc, it removes the next runnable worker from the runnable list and sets its ...