Press "Enter" to skip to content

Shredding SSAS XEs

Bill Anton shows three separate methods for parsing SQL Server Analysis Services Extended Event data:

Warning, this method involves the use of .NET – proceed with caution! That said, please proceed because the results are certainly worth it.

The same 32MB file that took 5 minutes using the first method, 2 minutes using the second method, now only took ~3 seconds using this method. Also, the processing time is essentially linear – so even when we bump it up to 4 files (or ~128MB of data) its only going to take ~12 seconds. This would have brought us down to under 5 minutes to process all 3GB of data.

Again, I’m not a .NET expert (not really even a novice) so the code I’m sharing is most likely terrible…but it works (at least for me) and its fast. So here it is…read through it and feel free to heckle me in the comments 😉

Don’t heckle Bill; thank him.