Extended Events

If you ever tried to capture a benchmark on your SQL Server, you probably know that it is a complex operation. Not an impossible task, but definitely something that needs to be planned, timed and studied very thoroughly. The main idea is that you capture a workload from production, you extract some performance information, then you replay the same workload to one or more environments that you want to put to test, while capturing the same performance information. [Read More]

Three years ago, I started to work on a project called ExtendedTsqlCollector. I blogged about it multiple times here on spaghettidba.com. Even if I received positive feedback, I knew that one aspect was slowing down the adoption of the project: the Data Collector. That particular feature of SQL Server has a very bad reputation for being difficult to set up, customize and monitor. ExtendedTSQLCollector tried to address some of those issues, but the damage was already done and I knew that the Data Collector was already on the verge of extinction. [Read More]

Monitoring blocking and deadlocking hasn’t always been easy. Sometimes, the tools available in SQL Server are not as friendly as we would like them to be. Some are very useful for alerting, but don’t provide a simple way to capture additional information about the event. For instance, a simple SQLAgent alert for “deadlocks/sec > 0” is enough to shoot an email to the DBAs whenever a deadlock happens, but it doesn’t provide a simple way to capture the deadlock graph and include it in the email or save it to a destination table. [Read More]

I haven’t been blogging much lately, actually I haven’t been blogging at all in the last 4 months. The reason behind is I have been putting all my efforts in a new project I started recently, which absorbed all my attention and spare time. I am proud to announce that my project is now live and available to everyone for download. The project name is ExtendedTSQLCollector and you can find it at http://extendedtsqlcollector. [Read More]

Oooooops! I exchanged some emails about my post with Jonathan Kehayias and looks like I was wrong on many of the points I made. I don’t want to keep misleading information around and I definitely need to fix my wrong assumptions. Unfortunately, I don’t have the time to correct it immediately and I’m afraid it will have to remain like this for a while. Sorry for the inconvenience, I promise I will try to fix it in the next few days. [Read More]