Press "Enter" to skip to content

The Pain of fn_xe_file_target_read_file

Tom Zika plants a flag:

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 Pharma SQL 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.

4 Comments

  1. George Walkey
    George Walkey 2024-10-21

    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

    • Kevin Feasel
      Kevin Feasel 2024-10-22

      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!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.