In the last days I  had to work quite a lot with extended events in order to deeply monitor SQL Server performance. One interesting request that came out while implementing the monitoring infrastructure, was the possibility to monitor the performance of a set of stored procedures, vital for the correct handling of an online booking ...

One very useful usage of Extended Events is the ability to trap SQL Server error without the need to have a server trace running (which, btw, is deprecated), with the additional feature of being able to query the data as soon as it comes in. This means that we a solution to monitor and trap errors as soon as they happen can be easily created, in ...

Background Last year, I came to a very tough decision that I would cease publicizing Connect items in an attempt to drive up votes and get important issues fixed. This was almost entirely due to a couple of MVPs criticizing me for raising awareness of certain Connect items instead of letting them be found ''naturally.'' I wasn't sure what world ...

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 and sqlserver.sql_statement_starting Events and wanted to know how ...

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 like it is for the other events in the Books Online Topic (TransactionLog Event Class), or ...

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 ...