In SQL Server codenamed “Denali” we are moving our diagnostic tracing capabilities forward by building a system on top of Extended Events. With every new system you face the specter of migration which is always a bit of a hassle. I’m obviously motivated...

Check out What's new for Extended Events in SQL Server Codenamed "Denali" CTP3 for an overview of all of the new functionality released in CTP3. This post covers the details of the “reader” API, which we call the XeReader, that you can use to...

With the release of SQL Server 2012 RC0 you will notice that a number of new session templates have shown up in both the New Session Wizard and the New Session dialog. One template in particular, Activity Tracking, is unfortunately broken “out of the...

If you explored extended events to any degree you’ve already discovered that when you read the targets you get your event data back as XML. First things first, lets clear up a popular misconception; event data is not stored as XML in the targets, it’s...

Thanks to some help from SQL MVP Adam Mechanic , the Extended Events blog is now being cross posted on SQLblog.com. Except for the first two posts ( welcome message & Reading event data 101 ), these blogs will be identical so read whichever site you...

If you’ve done any troubleshooting of T-SQL, you know that sooner or later, probably sooner, you’re going to want to take a look at the actual statements you’re dealing with. In extended events we offer an action (See the BOL topic that covers Extended...

I’ve been generally lax about posting new stuff to the blog for the last several months, and I’m particularly behind in posting an update about what you’ll see in Denali CTP1 that is new for Extended Events. My only excuse is that we’ve been hard at work...

If you have not seen it already, Jonathan Kehayias is writing a 31 day series on extended events in celebration of the public release of Denali CTP1. You can start at the master post to find links to each days efforts. As of this writing he is on day...

SQL Server MVP Jonathan Kehayias ( blog ) emailed me a question last week when he noticed that the total memory used by the buffers for an event session was larger than the value he specified for the MAX_MEMORY option in the CREATE EVENT SESSION DDL....

If you haven’t gotten a chance to explorer Extended Events yet, then you’ll probably want to read about it first in Books Online. You can start at the SQL Server Extended Events topic and work from there. From the BOL topics you’ll learn that Extended...

Extended Events offers a rich filtering mechanism, called predicates, that allows you to reduce the number of events you collect by specifying criteria that will be applied during event collection. (You can find more information about predicates in Using...

Don’t worry, I haven’t suddenly switched the topic of this blog to English grammar, but if you want to learn more about Predicates as they apply to sentence constriction you can start with this article on WikipediA . Rather, today’s...

I got an interesting question from our Support team today and thought I’d blog the answer since it identified an area that can easily cause some confusion. In the BOL documentation for CREATE EVENT SESSION the description for the MAX_MEMORY session option...

One of the things I haven’t gotten around to blogging about yet is how to utilize Data Collector to capture data from event sessions. Raoul Illyes ( blog ) has relieved me of that duty by posting an article demonstrating how to use Data Collector...

You can control different aspects of how an event session behaves by setting the event session options as part of the CREATE EVENT SESSION DDL . The default settings for the event session options are designed to handle most of the common event collection...

For those fighting with all the Extended Event terminology, let's step back and have a small overall introduction to Extended Events. This post will give you a simplified end to end view through some of the elements in Extended Events. Before we start...

The ever alert Jonathan Kehayias ( Blog | Twitter ) sent me a question recently asking about the Extended Event UI used for showing predicates. In particular, he was wondering about the predicate for the wait_info event that is defined in the system_health...

I had an opportunity recently to contribute a presentation to the Microsoft Virtual Academy as part of the Mission Critical Confidence using SQL Server 2012 course offering. The MVA offers you a myriad of free training opportunities, so I encourage anyone...

The primary focus we’ve had for Extended Events in SQL Server codenamed “Denali” is to offer a better user experience by providing options for working with the system beyond DDL. One of those options is the availability of a managed code object model...

Recently I was troubleshooting a performance issue on an internal tracking workload and needed to collect some very low level events over a period of 3-4 hours. During analysis of the data I found that a common pattern I was using was to find a batch...

CTP3 is finally here and the crowd goes wild! Since I’m sure everyone has been anticipating the CTP3 updates to Extended Events (because, let’s face it, Extended Events is the most important part of the product, right?) let’s get to...

Check out What's new for Extended Events in SQL Server Codenamed "Denali" CTP3 for an overview of all of the new functionality released in CTP3. This post details the new user interface. In my overview post I mentioned that the user interface is built...