Tag: Christmas

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 application.

Get off that arctic island and warm up with a little XE fun. This script is quite simple but will show you what you may have out there on your servers. Once you see what is there, hopefully your curiosity will get a little piqued and you will want to learn a little more (there is more of that here on this site too).

The diagnostics process will trap various server related health (diagnostics) information related to the SQL Server instance in an effort to try and detect potential failures and errors.

In this article, the focus will be directed to the next leg of the black box recorder – or the system_health Extended Event Session.

Very much like what you may find with the airline industry, the black box recorder in SQL Server is not just a single method (device) implemented to capture all of the desired data points.

Using a file target is not difficult from a creation point of view (event session creation). But, some basics are critical or you could end up with fewer follicles.

How to correlate all of your favorite trace/profiler options into the shiny new XE equivalents.

As luck would have it, there is a means to correlate trace/profiler events to Extended Event events (yeah that sounds weird).  With the release of SQL Server 2012, Microsoft introduced a couple of catalog views to help with this correlation effort.

This is a very simple introduction into the creation of an Extended Event session using a template for Azure SQL DB. I demonstrate the use of the GUI to configure the session quickly and then to subsequently script that configuration before creating the session.