Gianluca Sartori continues a series on XESmartTarget. First up is a process to audit successful logins:
Sometimes you are not interested in the individual events captured by a session, but you want to extract some information from a series of events, by grouping and aggregating them. This is the case of events that happen very often, like, logon events, that can help you validate your story.
Imagine that you inherited a big, busy and chaotic SQL Server instance, with lots of databases and logins. One of the things that you probably want to do is track which logins are active and which ones are not and can be safely disabled.
Once you have that in place, how about unused objects?
The previous recipe showed you how to capture data from Extended Events sessions, summarize it in memory and then save it to a table in SQL Server, merging with any existing rows. This comes extremely handy when the events are not useful individually, but when the story is told by the aggregation of all the events.
Another possible problem that can be solved with the same technique is finding unused objects in the database. It looks like a trivial problem, but it’s not.
Read on to see how you can solve both of these issues.