Find Rogue Transactions in SQL Server

One of the developers approached me today asking why their simple SELECT SQL query was taking forever. I walked over to their desk and noticed their SQL code had a BEGIN TRAN but no COMMIT or ROLLBACK. I ran a:

SELECT @@trancount

…but that didn’t bring back anything. So then I ran:

DBCC OPENTRAN

…and it returned an open transaction with its associated SPID.

How to find rogue transactions in SQL Server

I used the KILL command to kill SPID 57 (Kill 57) and the developer’s query returned instantly.

And just in case you were wondering, the cause of the rogue transaction was a BEGIN statement that the developer ran without a COMMIT or ROLLBACK and the developer tried to access that same table in another session window.