I haven’t had a rant post in a while. There is a saying: “Anything before the word ‘but’ is ignored”. I love Extended Events, but … reading the extended event file is so much pain.
It feels like there is a conspiracy between Microsoft and Big
PharmaSQL Monitoring because the best analytics tool available in SQL Server (and I mean Extended Events and Query Store of course) have the worst GUI and supporting tools. I’m focusing on XE in this post.
Read on for Tom’s rant. To add on to it, the feedback item Tom links to now has a new update from Dimitri Furman, indicating (based on how I’m reading it) that the fix will be in SQL vNext, not SQL Server 2022.
Dan Guzman showed us how to use two DLLs from SSMS/SQL (XEvent.Linq.dll and XECore.dll assemblies) in Powershell to read the XEL files into a SQL table years ago. Its about 60X faster
Thanks for the heads up. For anyone following along, Dan answered the question on DBA Stack Exchange: https://dba.stackexchange.com/questions/206863/what-is-the-right-tool-to-process-big-xel-files-sql-server-extended-events-log
Did… did I make a difference?
If it were me, I’d totally claim full credit for it. So yes, you made a difference. Now it’s time to let it go to your head and begin demanding sweeping changes!