The Rambling DBA: Jonathan Kehayias

Times they are a changing…

Jonathan Kehayias — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 18:23:04 GMT

If you follow me on twitter ( @SQLSarg ), you already know that this has been a week of big announcements for me. Wednesday afternoon Paul Randal ( Blog | Twitter ) announced that I joined SQLskills.com as a full time employee, and Thursday afternoon,...(read more)

TSQL Tuesday #15 – Maintaining Your Sanity While Managing Large Environments

Jonathan Kehayias — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 04:19:00 GMT

This month’s TSQL Tuesday event is being hosted by Pat Wright (Blog | Twitter) and the topic this month is Automation! “ I figured that since many of you out there set a goal this year to blog more and to learn Powershell then this Topic should help in...(read more)

Making Use of Plan Explorer in my own Environment

Jonathan Kehayias — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 03:50:47 GMT

Back in October 2010, I briefly blogged about the SQL Sentry Plan Explorer in my blog post wrap up for SQL Bits 7 and how impressed I was with what I saw from a Alpha demo standpoint from Greg Gonzalez ( Blog | Twitter ) while I was at SQLBits 7 in York. ...(read more)

Parsing the sqlserver.sql_text Action in Extended Events by Offsets

Jonathan Kehayias — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 02:05:43 GMT

A couple of weeks back I received an email from a member of the community who was reading the XEvent a Day blog series and had a couple of interesting questions about Extended Events. This person had created an Event Session that captured the sqlserver.sql_statement_completed...(read more)

Using Substring() in XML FLOWR Queries

Jonathan Kehayias — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 03:41:24 GMT

Tonight I was monitoring the #sqlhelp hashtag on Twitter for a response to a question I asked when Randy Knight ( Twitter ) asked a question about using SUBSTRING in FLOWR statements with XML. #sqlhelp Is there a way to do a SQL Type "LIKE"...(read more)

Did the Community Lose It’s Focus, or Did I?

Jonathan Kehayias — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 23:05:00 GMT

Late Thursday night, ok it was actually very early Friday morning, I wrote a blog post that stirred a bit of a controversy in the community. While the outcome of the discussion that was sparked by that post in the community has been good, it is...(read more)

Has the SQL Community Lost its Focus?

Jonathan Kehayias — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 06:30:00 GMT

Yesterday, Thomas LaRock’s blog post, WMI Code Creator , was brought to my attention by a member of the SQL Community. I subscribe to Tom’s blog in my blog reader so eventually I’d like to think that his post would have come to my attention, but to be...(read more)

Using Extended Events in SQL Server Denali CTP1 to Map out the TransactionLog SQL Trace Event EventSubClass Values

Jonathan Kehayias — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 06:39:00 GMT

John Sansom ( Blog | Twitter ) asked on the MSDN Forums about the meaning/description for the numeric values returned by the EventSubClass column of the TransactionLog SQL Trace Event. John pointed out that this information is not available for this Event...(read more)

An XEvent a Day (31 of 31) – Event Session DDL Events

Jonathan Kehayias — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 19:00:00 GMT

To close out this month’s series on Extended Events we’ll look at the DDL Events for the Event Session DDL operations, and how those can be used to track changes to Event Sessions and determine all of the possible outputs that could exist from an Extended...(read more)

An XEvent a Day (30 of 31) – Tracking Session and Statement Level Waits

Jonathan Kehayias — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 02:00:00 GMT

While attending PASS Summit this year, I got the opportunity to hang out with Brent Ozar ( Blog | Twitter ) one afternoon while he did some work for Yanni Robel ( Blog | Twitter ). After looking at the wait stats information, Brent pointed out some...(read more)

An XEvent a Day (29 of 31) – The Future – Looking at Database Startup in Denali

Jonathan Kehayias — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 02:30:00 GMT

As I have said previously in this series, one of my favorite aspects of Extended Events is that it allows you to look at what is going on under the covers in SQL Server, at a level that has never previously been possible. SQL Server Denali CTP1 includes...(read more)

Learn Who Started that Trace with the Default Trace

Jonathan Kehayias — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 19:00:00 GMT

This is not Extended Event related but it came from a question on Twitter about how to tell who and from what machine a server side trace was created, and there is no way to explain this in 140 characters so here’s a blog post. This information...(read more)

An XEvent a Day (28 of 31) – Tracking Page Compression Operations

Jonathan Kehayias — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 02:00:00 GMT

The Database Compression feature in SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Edition can provide some significant reductions in storage requirements for SQL Server databases, and in the right implementations and scenarios performance improvements as well. There...(read more)

An XEvent a Day (27 of 31) – The Future - Tracking Page Splits in SQL Server Denali CTP1

Jonathan Kehayias — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 02:00:00 GMT

Nearly two years ago Kalen Delaney blogged about Splitting a page into multiple pages , showing how page splits occur inside of SQL Server. Following her blog post, Michael Zilberstein wrote a post, Monitoring Page Splits with Extended Events ,...(read more)

An XEvent a Day (26 of 31) – Configuring Session Options

Jonathan Kehayias — Mon, 27 Dec 2010 02:00:00 GMT

There are 7 Session level options that can be configured in Extended Events that affect the way an Event Session operates. These options can impact performance and should be considered when configuring an Event Session. I have made use of...(read more)