RML Utilities

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]

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]

A couple of weeks ago I posted a method to convert trace files from the SQL Server 2012 format to the SQL Server 2008 format. The trick works quite well and the trace file can be opened with Profiler or with ReadTrace from RML Utilities. What doesn’t seem to work just as well is the trace replay with Ostress (another great tool bundled in the RML Utilities). For some reason, OStress refuses to replay the whole trace file and starts throwing lots of errors. [Read More]

Yesterday I posted a method to convert trace files from SQL Server 2012 to SQL Server 2008R2 using a trace table. As already mentioned in that post, having to load the whole file into a trace table has many shortcomings: The trace file can be huge and loading it into a trace table could take forever The trace data will consume even more space when loaded into a SQL Server table The table has to be written back to disk in order to obtain the converted file You need to have Profiler 2008 in order to write a trace in the " [Read More]

Recently I started using RML utilities quite a lot. ReadTrace and Ostress are awesome tools for benchmarking and baselining and many of the features found there have not been fully implemented in SQLServer 2012, though Distributed Replay was a nice addition. However, as you may have noticed, ReadTrace is just unable to read trace files from SQLServer 2012, so you may get stuck with a trace file you wont’ abe able to process. [Read More]