Our application interfaces with a partner's application by calling one of their stored procedures. They insist on sprinkling NOLOCK hints throughout their code and this is a long stored procedure. We are intermittently getting bad data and suspect a race condition.
Is there any way, short of manually changing their stored procedure, that we can override their NOLOCK hints when executing it?
Note — our code making the stored procedure call is a .NET application, in case that gives us any other options.
Best Answer
No, query-level hints and options override session and server-level settings. Basically, a hint applied at the query level is the lowest common denominator, and wins (except in the case of MAXDOP and Resource Governor, but that's slightly different than what we're talking about here anyway).
This used to be documented for SQL Server 2000, but this verbiage has been removed from more modern versions of the documentation.