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" or "SUBSTRING" in the where clause of FLWOR statement? Need to evaluate just first n ...

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 is tracked in the Default Trace and can be found by querying for EventClass 175 which is the Audit ...

I tweeted this last week on twitter and got a lot of retweets so I thought that I’d blog the story behind the tweet. Most vendor databases have views in them, and when people want to retrieve data from a database, it seems like the most common first stop they make are the vendor supplied Views.  This post is in no way a bash against the ...

Part of the reason for a reduction in the amount of blogging that I have been doing is that I have tried to expand the amount of information that I put into writing up a topic and instead of blogging those topics, publish them as articles online.  My most recent article was just published on SQL Server Central and is titled “Using a ...

Here’s another use for the information captured by the default trace.  Ever wonder what session created the tables that exist in tempdb?  Well you can find it using the default trace and the sys.objects view in tempdb.  Any time an object is created in a database, EventClass 46 (Object:Created) is captured in the trace output of the ...

This is one of those topics I planned to blog about a long time ago, but never actually got around to it, and consequently I keep having to hit search engines to find the code I provided in a forums post when I need to use it again.  A while back, I helped fellow SQL enthusiast Jeremiah Peschka (@peschkaj) out via twitter with finding plans ...

A common question of the forums is ''How do I stop these deadlocks?''  I wrote a small reference article on the SQL Examples Site for the forums for how to trap deadlocks using trace flags and Madhu Nair wrote an article for how to trap them with SQL Profiler: Troubleshoot Deadlocking in SQL Server. Troubleshoot Deadlocking in SQL Server ...