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 Event Session.  One of my least favorite quirks about Extended Events is that there is ...

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 potential problem points, and based on that information I pulled up my code for my PASS session the ...

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 a number of new Events that expand on the information that we can learn about how SQL ...

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 isn’t really a whole lot of information about the operations of database compression that is ...

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, that showed how to see the sqlserver.page_split Events using Extended Events.  Eladio Rincón ...

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 a few of these periodically throughout this months blog posts, and in today’s blog post I’ll cover ...

Correction:  I mistakenly stated that Tim Mitchel had blogged the 12 days of SQL Christmas, and was informed that Tim Ford is who wrote that blog post.  My sincerest apologies to Tim and Tim for the mix up.  The post has been corrected below.  In the spirit of today’s holiday, a couple of people have been posting SQL ...

One of the actions inside of Extended Events is the package0.callstack and the only description provided by sys.dm_xe_objects for the object is 16-frame call stack.  If you look back at The system_health Session blog post, you’ll notice that the package0.callstack Action has been added to a number of the Events that the PSS team thought were ...

While working on yesterday’s blog post The Future – fn_dblog() No More? Tracking Transaction Log Activity in Denali I did a quick Google search to find a specific blog post by Paul Randal to use it as a reference, and in the results returned another blog post titled, Investigating Multiple Transaction Log Files in SQL Server caught my eye so I ...

I bet that made you look didn’t it?  Worry not, fn_dblog() still exists in SQL Server Denali, and I plan on using it to validate the information being returned by a new Event in SQL Server Denali CTP1, sqlerver.transaction_log, which brings with it the ability to correlate specific transaction log entries to the operations that actually ...