Press "Enter" to skip to content

Category: Extended Events

Tracking Power BI Desktop Activity in SQL Server

Published 2022-10-06 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb looks in on things:

Something I do all the time when performance tuning Power BI is use SQL Server Profiler to monitor query and refresh activity. There’s a handy external tool that lets you open up Profiler with a connection to Power BI Desktop; if you’re using Power BI Premium you can also connect Profiler up to a published dataset using the XMLA Endpoint. Profiler is a bit old-school though and likely to lead to snarky comments from SQL Server DBAs (it’s not deprecated for Analysis Services though!) who’ll say you should be using Extended Events (aka xEvents) instead. And guess what – did you know you can use Analysis Services xEvents to monitor activity in Power BI Desktop?

It’s the power of Extended Events.

Comments closed

Tracking Bulk Insert Usage with Extended Events

Published 2022-09-30 by Kevin Feasel

Grant Fritchey wants to see if you’re bulking up:

Wouldn’t it be great to be able to directly monitor specific behaviors within SQL Server, like, oh, I don’t know, knowing exactly when, and how, someone is using BULK INSERT? Well, you can, thanks to Extended Events through the bulk_insert_usage event.

Click through for an overview of what this event provides, as well as what it doesn’t provide.

Comments closed

query_antipattern_type Extended Event

Published 2022-09-13 by Kevin Feasel

Aaron Bertrand is intrigued:

But one thing that caught my eye in all the ruckus is a new Extended Event called query_antipattern, which is a lot more up my personal alley. You may have come across my Bad Habits series, or might have seen me rant about some of these in person. I think this is a promising compromise between manually parsing every single query and just not realizing how many little things are collectively bringing SQL Server to its knees.

This event is not yet documented, but it seems like it could be some combination of runtime code analysis and execution plan inspection. Right now, all we have to go on is a set of cryptic values in sys.dm_xe_map_values:

Read on to see those values and Aaron’s speculation.

Comments closed

Filtered XML Deadlock Reports with Extended Events

Published 2022-07-15 by Kevin Feasel

Grant Fritchey digs into a useful Extended Event:

One of my favorite little bits of information about Extended Events is the fact that everyone running a full instance of SQL Server has deadlock information available to them, even if they never enabled Trace Flag 1222 through the system_health session. That captures the xml_deadlock_report which has the full deadlock graph. However, what if you want to capture deadlock info, but, you’re dealing the GDPR, and transmitting query values could be problematic? Enter xml_deadlock_report_filtered.

Read on to see how it works, though note Grant’s warning that this is a non-documented event.

Comments closed

Finding Unique Key Violations with Extended Events

Published 2022-07-06 by Kevin Feasel

Grant Fritchey points out another use for extended events:

Most of the time when I talk about or demo Extended Events, I spend more time talking about query tuning (I have a problem). However, there are tons of things that you can do with Extended Events. Here’s a little one that came up, auditing unique constraint violations.

It can also handle most other types of errors, making this a robust way of tracking issues. Back in the 2008 days, I built a little WPF program to watch for all of the errors on the couple of production SQL Server instances I managed. At one point, I saw one of the devs trying to write a query and getting an error. I IM’d the dev and said “You forgot the GROUP BY clause” (or whatever the problem was—it was something minor like that). He came over with a bit of panicked excitement, trying to figure out how exactly I was able to see what he wrote given that I was nowhere near his cube. Good times.

Comments closed

Extended Events in SQL Server 2022

Published 2022-05-26 by Kevin Feasel

Tom Zika checks out some extended events:

It has been announced today (2022-05-24) during the MS Build event. The blog post includes a download link. Unfortunately, the Docker container is not quite ready yet.

Anyway, because I’m a #TeamXE, I had to check out if there are any new goodies there. So, I took an XE event list from Microsoft SQL Server 2019 (RTM-CU16) and the new one from Microsoft SQL Server 2022 (CTP2.0) and compared them.

There are a lot of new events—click through to see how many.

Comments closed

Using Extended Events with AWS RDS

Published 2022-05-03 by Kevin Feasel

Grant Fritchey tries out extended events in Amazon’s RDS:

AWS has posted the documentation on what you have to do in order to enable the collection of Extended Events within RDS. Normallly, I’d follow along with the documentation. However, I’m going to approach this like I knew that Extended Events support was there, but I wasn’t aware of the docs. So, I’m starting in SSMS and I’m just going to try plugging in the Extended Events GUI to see what happens. Further, I’m going to use the simplest method for launching Extended Events, XEvent Profiler. 

Read on for Grant’s findings.

Comments closed

Troubleshooting Out-of-Memory Errors in SQL Server’s Database Engine

Published 2022-03-31 by Kevin Feasel

Dimitri Furman shows off a DMV:

As part of our efforts to improve database engine supportability, we have added a new dynamic management view (DMV), sys.dm_os_out_of_memory_events. It is now available in Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Managed Instance and will become available in a future version of SQL Server. If an out-of-memory (OOM) event occurs in the database engine, this view will provide details to help you troubleshoot the problem, including the OOM cause, memory consumption by the database engine components at the time of event, potential memory leaks (if any), and other relevant information.

Read on to learn more about it, as well as a corresponding Extended Event.

Comments closed