Aaron Bertrand has a philosophical dilemma:
Now, in order to capture this data to DDLEventLog, we have a background process running on a schedule that extracts all the new data from the latest .xel files and loads it into the table. (There’s also a process that moves files we know we’ve consumed and deletes them 90 days later to keep the loading job linear.)
This revealed an edge case where it is possible to lose one aspect of the data: database name. When originally building the session, I thought database_id would be enough because the loading process could always look up the name from there. But this is brittle. Imagine the case where a user drops a table, drops the database, then the loading process pulls data from the session. That data about dropping the table contains just a database_id that no longer exists.
Read on for Aaron’s thoughts and ultimate decision.