T-SQL Tuesday #166: Wrap-up

Once more, my apologies for being late on getting the T-SQL Tuesday announcement out. I have no excuse. However, our extended event on Extended Events (yes, I’m the third person to make this joke, yes, I’m blatantly stealing) still has several entries, so let’s talk about them.

Let’s get mine out of the way. I was simply curious what the search engines revealed when I asked a pretty common question: how do you identify slow queries? What I found was, the answers on most search engines to this question are old, very old. Not to say wrong, but since many of them were created before a working version of Extended Events (let alone Query Store) was released, how could they tell you.

On to actually good posts.

One of my friends from Down Under, Rob Farley, sums it up pretty simply: Profiler works. It’s not a question of if it works worse or doesn’t include all kinds of new functionality. It does the basic job, so people haven’t moved to Extended Events. Of course, he then goes on to point out that, it is an old-school way of doing things and if you really want to advance yourself and your team, looking at the new stuff, Extended Events, is a great way to go. Excellent take. Thanks Rob!

Chad Callahan shows how Extended Events doesn’t just capture all the nice things, but shows us when things have gone sideways. He simply uses the error_reported event to capture errors. Cool. But then thigns get good. One of my favorite features, that I know people do not know about, is the Live Data Window. It’s cool. Chad shows us just a sample, and a good sample, of how that works. Nice work Chad.

Kenneth Fisher also popped in with a post on how he’s using Erik Darling’s work on sp_HumanEvents. Kenneth shows how you can simply spin up an Extended Events session, capture some data, and then make that go away using Erik’s procedure. It’s a slick way to take advantage of Extended Events without taking the time & trouble to learn the details behind them, making things just a little easier. Excellent stuff.

And, sadly, that’s all the ones I have. I blame myself for not giving everyone enough lead time. However, thanks everyone for playing. And please, if you’ve never heard of, or haven’t tried, Extended Events, give it a look. This technology isn’t going away.

UPDATE:

I’ve got two more!

Tom Zika has a nice post. He shows how to query to retrieve events. Yes, there are that many that something like this is extremely useful.

Erik Darling shows off the work he’s done on sp_HumanEvents. It’s a great way to be able to avoid some of the difficult parts of Extended Events (mainly the gosh darned XML). He’s also got some other cool tricks cooked in there and it’s well worth your time to check it out.

Thanks everyone!