This is the third installment of my posts on the performance impact of enabling SQL Server 2008 R2 Audit. My previous two posts (part I and part II) show that whether it’s on a two-processor machine or an eight-processor machine, enabling an audit with the queue_delay property set to 0 can destroy the database performance. In particular, those two ...

In my previous post on this subject, I showed the test results from a two-processor machine. Naturally, you may wonder: do we expect to see the same dramatic throughput drop when we enable a synchronous audit (i.e. with the queue_delay property set to 0) on a more powerful machine? The answer is yes. The following table shows the test results ...

The SQL Server Audit feature introduced in SQL Server2008 is useful in many scenarios. Although it still has much room for improvement, it has made SQL Server auditing easier to manage, and in particular, it has reduced performance impact as compared with a similar audit setup using SQL Trace. However, this does not mean that you should ignore ...