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What Are Latches and How Do They Differ From Locks?

Senior MS SQL
Quick Answer Latches are lightweight, short-lived synchronization objects for physical consistency of in-memory pages รขโ‚ฌโ€ they don't appear in deadlock graphs and aren't tracked like locks. Locks are for logical, transaction-level concurrency รขโ‚ฌโ€ they persist for the transaction duration and show up in blocking queries and deadlocks.

Answer

Latches protect internal memory structures and are non-transactional.

Locks protect logical data consistency and last for transaction duration.

Latch waits = engine pressure.
Lock waits = concurrency or blocking issues.

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