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Profiler for Extended Events: Quick Settings
Not long ago, I wrote a rather long article about a new-ish feature within SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) that impacted Extended Events. You can read that book – here! The XEvents Profiler feature...
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Extended Events File Initialization Failure
It should come as no surprise that I write a lot of articles about Extended Events (XE). This happens to be another article on Extended Events. Truth be told, this article is hopefully something that...
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SQLs Black Box Recorder – sp_server_diagnostics
Yesterday i shared the first article in a three part series about the SQL Black Box Recorder, that you can read here, with a promise of at least two more posts. The first article in the series laid...
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Finding Installed Event Sessions
As a DBA, it is not uncommon to feel like you are marooned off on some tiny little island trying to figure things out for yourself. It may even be very common to feel the icy pain of the development...
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Finding Application Session Settings
One of the underused troubleshooting and performance tuning techniques is to validate the application session settings. Things can work fabulous inside of SSMS, but run miserably inside the...
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Checking your Memory with XE
It is well known and understood that SQL Server requires a substantial amount of memory. SQL Server will also try to consume as much memory as possible from the available system memory – if you let it....
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Event Tracing for Windows Target
There are many useful targets within SQL Server’s Extended Events. Of all of the targets, the most daunting is probably the Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) target. The ETW target represents doing...
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Automatic Tuning Monitoring and Diagnostics
Cool new toys/tools have been made available to the data professional. Among these tools are query data store and automatic tuning. These two tools actually go hand in hand and work pretty nicely...
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Short Circuiting Your Session
It isn’t very often that one would consider a short circuit to be a desired outcome. In SQL Server we have a cool exception to that rule – Extended Events (XE). What exactly is a short circuit and why...
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Quick Permissions Audit
Whether it is for a client, an audit, or just for good housekeeping, DBAs will often need to figure out who has access to what. In addition, they may need to know by what means people have access...
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Audit SQL Agent Jobs
One probably seldom thinks of the SQL Agent jobs scheduled on the SQL Server instance – unless they fail. What if the job failed because something was changed in the job? Maybe you knew about the...
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Easy Permissions Audit
Something I have written about more than a handful of times is the need to audit. When people think about audits, the first thing that comes to mind is most likely the IRS and taxes. More than taxes...
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An Experiment with Deadlocks
Everything can be fixed with a query hint (*cough* directive), right? If a certain process is consistently causing deadlocks, a simple ROWLOCK hint can be added to prevent it, right? Well, for whatever...
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Database Recovery Monitoring with XE
On of the greatest benefits of Extended Events (xe) is how the tool simplifies some of the otherwise more difficult tasks. Recently, I wrote a rewrite of my database recovery progress report script....
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Event Log File Paths
How does one consistently find the correct path to the Extended Event Log file (XEL file)? This is a topic that I ventured into some time ago. The previous article can be read here. In that article I...
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Mass Backup All Sessions
Migrating Extended Event Sessions from one server to another should be a simple task. So simple, one would think there was no need to give it a second thought, right? Well, I have previously written...
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Easy Open Event Log Files
One of the beauties of using a tool such as Extended Events (XEvents) is the versatility and ease of use. XEvents can be used for so many things to help an aspiring DBA or Developer do their job...
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Get the Source of PREEMPTIVE_OS_PIPEOPS Waits
A client reached out to me for help about a wait_type they were seeing. That’s not terribly uncommon, but the specific wait_type was something that was fairly obscure. Every day, they could see the...
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Database File Changes
Data professionals around the globe are frequently finding themselves occupied with figuring out why and when a file (data or log) for a database has changed in size. Whether that change is a growth...
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Implicit Conversion Insights with XE
Implicit In a recent article, I covered a little bit about implicit conversions and an error that may crop up from time to time. It is one thing to understand what an error means, it is an entirely...
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