Managing database backups is a critical role of the successful DBA. Understanding what the backup plan is and ensuring backups occur on schedule is not always transparent to the DBA as exposed in this tale.
The Mystery of Missing Backup Files
Tag: Extended Events
Capture the Flag – The Trace Flag
Despite the controls in place there always seems to be some change that is unknown or even some cowboy that makes changes as s/he sees fit and forgets to notify people or follow process.
Auditing when Database Files Change
As a Database Administrator, something that should be part of your database audit is monitoring the growth of files. That means tracking when the log file grows and tracking when the data file(s) grow(s).
Azure Data Studio and XEvents
Azure Data Studio (ADS) is getting all sorts of love and attention these days. So much so that they have finally gotten around to adding Extended Events (XE) to the tool – sort of. Now we have the power to run traces on SQL Server via ADS.
How Long is That Event Taking
Knowing just how long an event takes is a common requirement when troubleshooting. Sometimes, figuring out the unit of time is a bit troublesome. Is it milliseconds, seconds or microseconds?
Monitor Database Offline Events
Hopefully, a database being taken offline is a known event and not a surprise. Occasionally there are gremlins, in the form of users with too many permissions, that tend to do very strange things.
Extended Events File Initialization Failure
One of the recommended methods to trap payload data in an XE session is via the use of the event_file target. Sending data to a file has numerous benefits such as being able to take the trace and evaluate the trace file from a different machine (locally to that machine).
Profiler for Extended Events: Quick Settings
As of SSMS 17.4 we have been given the ability to control XEvents Profiler just a tiny bit more. For what it is worth, we as Database Professionals love to be able to control our database environment. So this teeny tiny bit of new control ability is potentially a huge win, right?
Checking the Health of your CLR
Having a tool to be able to monitor CLR health will be essential as you deploy more and more managed code within SQL Server. Extended Events offers a great lightweight means to do just that. This article shows how to deploy a session that will capture the various changes with CLR objects within our database environment. In addition, you will be able to capture various conditions related to performance or problems with the managed code. You may even recognize some of the CLR events from the system_health session.
Sharepoint Diagnostics and XE
In this article I have introduced you to a quick session setup that comes from using the SPDiag tool that could plausibly be useful in the troubleshooting of various different problems (most probably performance related) with Sharepoint.