Critical incident diagnosis
Getting order processing working after recovery
Application and database concurrency analysis resolved the blocking and deadlocks preventing a recovered business system from operating reliably.
Steven Wittek’s prior employment and consulting experience · Organization anonymized
The work
After a ransomware-related disruption and infrastructure recovery, a business still could not use its Microsoft Dynamics application reliably. Order processing was affected by recurring SQL Server blocking, deadlocks, and poor performance. Recovering the infrastructure had not resolved the application’s operating problem.
I was brought in as the database specialist to investigate the behavior across the application and SQL Server. I examined locking and concurrency evidence and worked with the application and infrastructure teams to establish what was preventing transactions from completing normally.
The investigation identified a mismatch between the application’s transaction-isolation requirements and the database configuration. I worked across the teams to get that mismatch corrected. The reported blocking and deadlocks then cleared, and normal application processing resumed.
The value of the work was connecting a business-critical symptom to its underlying cause across multiple technical layers. My role was the post-recovery application and database diagnosis; the wider ransomware response and infrastructure recovery were separate responsibilities.
Engineering outcome
Resolved the application/database isolation mismatch associated with post-recovery blocking and deadlocks, allowing normal order processing to resume.