I was looking at data from a customer, in a different time zone (UTC+1) from mine, this week involving SQL Server AlwaysOn (HADRON) and found that lining up the timestamps in the various logs was challenging.   Some times are local to the SQL Server instance, others UTC and yet other utilities...

This would be a perfect time to post a blog talking about the new SQL Server 2012 features.  However, I am going to leave that activity to the marketing folks ( AlwaysOn, T-SQL Enhancements, … ).   I want to talk about something that might not appear on the top of a marketing or sales...

I have been supporting Microsoft’s JDBC driver for almost six years now and the one thing with which I always struggle is getting logging going.  JDBC logging is probably some of the most useful logging out there (I only wish BID tracing were so easy to enable and consume!), but for some reason...

The is more of an FYI blog post but I have read several blog and forum posts on this subject and I decided to dig into the behavior which revealed a trace bug. For the vast majority of events the Session Login Name represents the originating session credentials where as the Login Name represents the...

A short but good discussion about the RML comparison DIFF calculations.   From: Robert Dorr Sent: Wednesday, January 26, 2011 10:21 AM Subject: RE: MSDN Blogs: Contact request: RML Tools: Estimated Comparison Differences   Thanks for the question and feedback.   For example ProjectedCPUDiff...

From: Robert Dorr Sent: Friday, August 13, 2010 8:58 AM Subject: RE: SQL Server Trace Replay - "Replay Result Set Event" The Result Set event is one of several client side replay events. Here are some of Common Result Event Columns Text Returned values for example DECLARE @edition sysname;...

_____________________________________________ Subject: RE: dumptrigger question They don't survive service restart. SQL 2000 did not have dumptrigger enabled for all error messages and I think 1105 is an ex_callprint instead of ex_raise so it won't work but I would have to look at the code to be certain...

You may or may not have heard of a new diagnostic technology in SQL Server 2008 called Extended Events (XEvent). I thought I would post an example of why this technology can do things nothing else we have can when you deploy SQL Server 2008. Someone internally contacted me about a problem they were having...

At first glance it appears that ReadTrace has generated an unexpected connect node.  Upon closer inspection the behavior is correct in order to maintain the proper set options for the connection. Trace has both physical and logical connect/disconnect events.   The logical is indicated...

Many of you have encountered the RDTSC timing variances that I outlined in an earlier blog post:   http://blogs.msdn.com/psssql/archive/2006/11/27/sql-server-2005-sp2-will-introduce-new-messages-to-the-error-log-related-to-timing-activities.aspx and http://blogs.msdn.com/psssql/archive/2007...

MSDN, TechNet, Books Online and other sources outline what Multiple Active Result Sets (MARS) is, how to use it and transaction scopes.   Working on an issue this week I found I needed to understand what the trace looked like.  In doing so I found the following helpful. The trace column...

I was asked a question as the CSS First Aid Station at SQL PASS 2008 where the Activity Monitor kept showing the SQLCLR wait category as the top waiter, even when no other activity was going on.  After some digging I found that this is a bug and currently marked to be fixed SQL Server 2008 SP1. ...

I ran into this issue the other day and decided it would make a good post.  Since I have seen this issue more times that I can count I will again attempt to provide details. The attention event in SQL Server trace output indicates a query cancellation.   There are three common ways this...

SQL Server 2000 shipped with different trace file security than later builds of SQL Server 2000, SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008. The SQL Server process (sqlservr.exe) writes the trace files to the specified destination.   The SQL Server 2000 release did not explicitly set the ACLs on the...

The Senior Escalation Engineers do various training and mentoring activities. As I do this I thought I would try to propagate some of this information on the blog. This was an interesting issue I ran into this week. The reported problem was that the data shown as TEXT for an RPC event did not match...

Starting with SQL Server 2005 SP2 the connection based events are also produced for sp_reset_connection activities, indicating the connection was reset. The pattern will look like the following. RPC:Starting sp_reset_connection Disconnect Subclass = 2 RPC:Completed sp_reset_connection Connect Subclass...

Many of us are used to looking at a SQL Trace and making the assumption that the order of display is what occurred during the capture. SQL Server 2005 introduced a new column named ‘Event Sequence’ that you should capture for any trace events. The Event Sequence is the order the trace event was internally...