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Category: Extended Events

Tracing Trigger Executions in SQL Server

Published 2026-01-06 by Kevin Feasel

Kendra Little does some investigating:

Triggers can be tricky to observe in SQL Server. When you need to understand exactly what a trigger is doing and what it impacts, Query Store and Extended Events both have something to offer, but using them effectively requires navigating some confusing nuances. Query Store tracks query-level executions aggregated by query_id, but has a habit of generating a lot of query_ids with different context settings for triggers. Extended Events can capture trigger module starts and individual statement completions within triggers.

This post walks through setting up both observation methods on a test trigger, then compares what each one shows. You’ll see how Query Store data gets spread across multiple query_ids and context_settings_id values, a variety of ways to trace triggers in XEvents, and why the numbers don’t always match up exactly between traces and Query Store.

This is definitely worth the read. Kendra does a great job laying things out in a thoughtful manner and provides a lot of additional insight.

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Filtering RPC_COMPLETED Extended Events

Published 2025-12-16 by Kevin Feasel

Kendra Little builds a filter:

The rpc_completed event in Extended Events is useful when troubleshooting SQL Server performance. It captures detailed information about Remote Procedure Calls: that means stored procedure executions, including the calls to sp_executesql often used by applications (including Entity Framework) to run parameterized queries against SQL Server. The output for rpc_completed includes the parameters that were specified along with values provided, and the CPU time, logical reads, and duration used by the query.

It can be frustrating to figure out how to filter this in Extended Events. Struggling with this is one of the primary reasons I sometimes use ye Olde Profiler for initial investigations and to speedily observe something in SQL Server.

Here is my survival guide to filtering rpc_completed, which makes using XEvents suck less.

Kendra digs in deep, including several common gotchas and solid recommendations, including the use of Erik Darling’s sp_humanevents.

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Trying Time-Bound Extended Events in SQL Server 2025 RC0

Published 2025-08-29 by Kevin Feasel

Reitse Eskens check the state of the art:

What’s new in SQL 2025 is that the team behind SQL Server 2025 has addressed an issue that I’ve encountered once or twice as well. If you start an extended event, it will run until you stop it. Yes, you have to manually stop it. If you don’t, it will stop eventually. Together with some other services, because the disk space has run out. In my case, I was fortunate that the servers were monitored and alerts were triggered due to low disk space.

In this new version, starting with Release Candidate 0 (RC0), you can configure the duration.

Click through for a demo, as well as current limitations (generally around this not being in the UI yet).

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Capture Long-Running Queries via Extended Events

Published 2025-07-11 by Kevin Feasel

Tom Collins has another extended events session for us:

A SQL Server Extended Event to track SQL queries taking longer than 100 seconds to complete. Adjust accoring to your requriements.

There is also a query below to extract the column details from the xel file 

Click through for the code. This kind of extended events session is rather useful for performance tuning and finding issues before customers e-mail.

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Capturing Blocking via Extended Event

Published 2025-07-09 by Kevin Feasel

Tom Collins has a pair of scripts:

Step 1 : Create the SQL Server  Extended Event and output to and event file

Step2 : Excecute this query to read the output of the xel files generated by the Extended Events Session .   

There’s not a lot of commentary around these, but the session includes blocked processes and deadlocks, so that’s nice if you have intermittent blocking chain issues.

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Troubleshooting with Extended Events

Published 2025-06-11 by Kevin Feasel

Grant Fritchey knows one way to solve the problem:

A client asked us to tell them when a query ran long. Simple. We have a long running query alert, all built in to Redgate Monitor, so, done. No, see, we like getting alerted when queries run long, but not really long, plus we’re more concerned with just one database.

Click through for the story and how Grant was able to help out the client. Also, read the comments for an entry by Special Guest Star Erik Darling.

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Choosing the Right Extended Events

Published 2025-04-01 by Kevin Feasel

Grant Fritchey makes a choice:

For this blog post I want to focus on the last one, Event Overload. There really are a lot of events in Extended Events. I don’t just think that’s a good thing. I think it’s a GREAT thing. However, I get it. I hit the same problem, regularly. Which events do I use to do thing that I’m trying to do? Except for blogs like this one, there’s not always a lot of guidance on these things. Microsoft has (good) documentation on Extended Events in general, but not on every event, plus, not a ton of guidance. (some though).

Click through for Grant’s advice.

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Reporting Query Errors via Extended Events

Published 2025-03-27 by Kevin Feasel

Tom Collins wants to know what’s going wrong:

We have an ETL job failing every night . The ETL job is using SQL Server Stored Procedures ,  so we’re looking to be trace the errors reported in SQL Server, to give some clues on how to fix the problem?

Do you have an approach to monitor and save SQL Server  error messages ?

This is an extremely useful way of catching problems in code, as well as people goofing up ad hoc queries.

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