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• An XEvent a Day (18 of 31) – A Look at Backup Internals and How to Track Backup and Restore Throughput (Part 2)

  - by Jonathan Kehayias

  In yesterday’s blog post A Look at Backup Internals and How to Track Backup and Restore Throughput (Part 1) , we looked at what happens when we Backup a database in SQL Server.  Today, we are going to use the information we captured to perform some analysis of the Backup information in an attempt to find ways to decrease the time it takes to backup a database.  When I began reviewing the data from the Backup in yesterdays post, I realized that I had made a mistake in the process and left...(read more)

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• Another Questionable Article Online…

  - by Jonathan Kehayias

  At the beginning of the month I blogged about my thoughts on the virtualization feedback provided by SSWUG’s newsletter , and Rich responded with some information on how the incorrect information lead him to making incorrect conclusions.  It seems like every couple of weeks an article, tip, newsletter, whatever is posted by or on a major site that has questionable if not outright incorrect material in it.  Last week MSSQLTips posted SQL Server tempdb one or multiple data files in which...(read more)

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• An XEvent a Day (19 of 31) – Using Customizable Fields

  - by Jonathan Kehayias

  Today’s post will be somewhat short, but we’ll look at Customizable Fields on Events in Extended Events and how they are used to collect additional information.  Customizable Fields generally represent information of potential interest that may be expensive to collect, and is therefore made available for collection if specified by the Event Session.  In SQL Server 2008 and 2008 R2, there are 50 Events that have customizable columns in their payload.  In SQL Server Denali CTP1, there...(read more)

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• Some thoughts on interviewing….

  - by Jonathan Kehayias

  At the beginning of the year I changed jobs, leaving a very stable position where I had the opportunity to learn under an amazing mentor (who happened to be a Oracle DBA and not a SQL DBA), to take on a job that I felt was much more challenging and had better potential for personal as well as professional growth.  I wasn’t necessarily looking for another job at the time, but one that interested me was mentioned at our local user group meeting and I decided to check it out and see if it was something...(read more)

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• An XEvent a Day (3 of 31) – Managing Event Sessions

  - by Jonathan Kehayias

  Yesterdays post, Querying the Extended Events Metadata , showed how to discover the objects available for use in Extended Events.  In todays post, we’ll take a look at the DDL Commands that are used to create and manage Event Sessions based on the objects available in the system.  Like other objects inside of SQL Server, there are three DDL commands that are used with Extended Events; CREATE EVENT SESSION , ALTER EVENT SESSION , and DROP EVENT SESSION .  The command names are self...(read more)

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• An XEvent a Day (13 of 31) – The system_health Session

  - by Jonathan Kehayias

  Today’s post was originally planned for this coming weekend, but seems I’ve caught whatever bug my kids had over the weekend so I am changing up today’s blog post with one that is easier to cover and shorter.  If you’ve been running some of the queries from the posts in this series, you have no doubt come across an Event Session running on your server with the name of system_health.  In today’s post I’ll go over this session and provide links to references related to it. When Extended Events...(read more)

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• An XEvent a Day (17 of 31) – A Look at Backup Internals and How to Track Backup and Restore Throughput (Part 1)

  - by Jonathan Kehayias

  Today’s post is a continuation of yesterday’s post How Many Checkpoints are Issued During a Full Backup? and the investigation of Database Engine Internals with Extended Events.  In today’s post we’ll look at how Backup’s work inside of SQL Server and how to track the throughput of Backup and Restore operations.  This post is not going to cover Backups in SQL Server as a topic; if that is what you are looking for see Paul Randal’s TechNet Article Understanding SQL Server Backups . Yesterday...(read more)

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• An XEvent a Day (15 of 31) – Tracking Ghost Cleanup

  - by Jonathan Kehayias

  If you don’t know anything about Ghost Cleanup, I recommend highly that you go read Paul Randal’s blog posts Inside the Storage Engine: Ghost cleanup in depth , Ghost cleanup redux , and Turning off the ghost cleanup task for a performance gain .  To my knowledge Paul’s posts are the only things that cover Ghost Cleanup at any level online. In this post we’ll look at how you can use Extended Events to track the activity of Ghost Cleanup inside of your SQL Server.  To do this, we’ll first...(read more)

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• An XEvent a Day (5 of 31) - Targets Week – ring_buffer

  - by Jonathan Kehayias

  Yesterday’s post, Querying the Session Definition and Active Session DMV’s , showed how to find information about the Event Sessions that exist inside a SQL Server and how to find information about the Active Event Sessions that are running inside a SQL Server using the Session Definition and Active Session DMV’s.  With the background information now out of the way, and since this post falls on the start of a new week I’ve decided to make this Targets Week, where each day we’ll look at a different...(read more)

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• Did the Community Lose It’s Focus, or Did I?

  - by Jonathan Kehayias

  Late Thursday night, ok it was actually very early Friday morning, I wrote a blog post that stirred a bit of a controversy in the community.  While the outcome of the discussion that was sparked by that post in the community has been good, it is definitely a case where the end isn’t justified by the means.   Hindsight is always 20/20, and while I stand by the point I was trying to make with that post, there are a number of ways I could have gone about making that point without risking...(read more)

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• An XEvent a Day (14 of 31) – A Closer Look at Predicates

  - by Jonathan Kehayias

  When working with SQL Trace, one of my biggest frustrations has been the limitations that exist in filtering.  Using sp_trace_setfilter to establish the filter criteria is a non-trivial task, and it falls short of being able to deliver complex filtering that is sometimes needed to simplify analysis.  Filtering of trace data was performed globally and applied to the trace affecting all of the events being collected.  Extended Events introduces a much better system of filtering using...(read more)

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• An XEvent a Day (12 of 31) – Using the Extended Events SSMS Addin

  - by Jonathan Kehayias

  The lack of SSMS support for Extended Events, coupled with the fact that a number of the existing Events in SQL Trace were not implemented in SQL Server 2008, has no doubt been a key factor in its slow adoption rate. Since the release of SQL Server Denali CTP1, I have already seen a number of blog posts that talk about the introduction of Extended Events in SQL Server, because there is now a stub for it inside of SSMS. Don’t get excited yet, the functionality in CTP1 is very limited at this point,...(read more)

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• An XEvent a Day (4 of 31) – Querying the Session Definition and Active Session DMV’s

  - by Jonathan Kehayias

  Yesterdays post, Managing Event Sessions , showed how to manage Event Sessions in Extended Events Sessions inside the Extended Events framework in SQL Server. In today's post, we’ll take a look at how to find information about the defined Event Sessions that already exist inside a SQL Server using the Session Definition DMV’s and how to find information about the Active Event Sessions that exist using the Active Session DMV’s. Session Definition DMV’s The Session Definition DMV’s provide information...(read more)

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• An XEvent a Day (16 of 31) – How Many Checkpoints are Issued During a Full Backup?

  - by Jonathan Kehayias

  This wasn’t my intended blog post for today, but last night a question came across #SQLHelp on Twitter from Varun ( Twitter ). #sqlhelp how many checkpoints are issued during a full backup? The question was answered by Robert Davis (Blog|Twitter) as: Just 1, at the very start. RT @ 1sql : #sqlhelp how many checkpoints are issued during a full backup? This seemed like a great thing to test out with Extended Events so I ran through the available Events in SQL Server 2008, and the only Event related...(read more)

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• An XEvent a Day (6 of 31) – Targets Week – asynchronous_file_target

  - by Jonathan Kehayias

  Yesterday’s post, Targets Week - ring_buffer , looked at the ring_buffer Target in Extended Events and how it outputs the raw Event data in an XML document.  Today I’m going to go over the details of the other Target in Extended Events that captures raw Event data, the asynchronous_file_target. What is the asynchronous_file_target? The asynchronous_file_target holds the raw format Event data in a proprietary binary file format that persists beyond server restarts and can be provided to another...(read more)

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• An XEvent a Day (8 of 31) – Targets Week – synchronous_event_counter

  - by Jonathan Kehayias

  Yesterday’s post, Targets Week - Bucketizers , looked at the bucketizer Targets in Extended Events and how they can be used to simplify analysis and perform more targeted analysis based on their output.  Today’s post will be fairly short, by comparison to the previous posts, while we look at the synchronous_event_counter target, which can be used to test the impact of an Event Session without actually incurring the cost of Event collection. What is the synchronous_event_counter? The synchronous_event_count...(read more)

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• An XEvent a Day (1 of 31) – An Overview of Extended Events

  - by Jonathan Kehayias

  First introduced in SQL Server 2008, Extended Events provided a new mechanism for capturing information about events inside the Database Engine that was both highly performant and highly configurable. Designed from the ground up with performance as a primary focus, Extended Events may seem a bit odd at first look, especially when you compare it to SQL Trace. However, as you begin to work with Extended Events, you will most likely change how you think about tracing problems, and will find the power...(read more)

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• An XEvent a Day (2 of 31) – Querying the Extended Events Metadata

  - by Jonathan Kehayias

  In yesterdays post, An Overview of Extended Events , I provided some of the necessary background for Extended Events that you need to understand to begin working with Extended Events in SQL Server. After receiving some feedback by email (thanks Aaron I appreciate it), I have changed the post naming convention associated with the post to reflect “2 of 31” instead of 2/31, which apparently caused some confusion in Paul Randal’s and Glenn Berry’s series which were mentioned in the round up post for...(read more)

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• An XEvent a Day (7 of 31) – Targets Week – bucketizers

  - by Jonathan Kehayias

  Yesterday’s post, Targets Week - asynchronous_file_target , looked at the asynchronous_file_target Target in Extended Events and how it outputs the raw Event data in an XML document. Continuing with Targets week today, we’ll look at the bucketizer targets in Extended Events which can be used to group Events based on the Event data that is being returned. What is the bucketizer? The bucketizer performs grouping of Events as they are processed by the target into buckets based on the Event data and...(read more)

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• An XEvent a Day (9 of 31) – Targets Week – pair_matching

  - by Jonathan Kehayias

  Yesterday’s post, Targets Week – synchronous_event_counter , looked at the counter Target in Extended Events and how it could be used to determine the number of Events a Event Session will generate without actually incurring the cost to collect and store the Events.  Today’s post is coming late, I know, but sometimes that’s just how the ball rolls.  My original planned demo’s for today’s post turned out to only work based on a fluke, though they were very consistent at working as expected,...(read more)

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• Reinventing the Wheel – Automating Data Consistency Checks with Powershell

  - by Jonathan Kehayias

  When I started in my current position at the beginning of the year, one of the first things that I did was to schedule a sit down with the various teams of Analysts that exist in our organization to find out more about their systems.  One thing I am always interested in is the manual processes that people do routinely that might be able to be automated.   A couple of the analyst mentioned that they routinely run queries in their systems to identify issues so that they can proactively...(read more)

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• Reinventing the Wheel – Automating Data Consistency Checks with Powershell

  - by Jonathan Kehayias

  When I started in my current position at the beginning of the year, one of the first things that I did was to schedule a sit down with the various teams of Analysts that exist in our organization to find out more about their systems.  One thing I am always interested in is the manual processes that people do routinely that might be able to be automated.   A couple of the analyst mentioned that they routinely run queries in their systems to identify issues so that they can proactively...(read more)

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• Don’t just P2V that server for Testing!

  - by Jonathan Kehayias

  If you use virtualization in your company, at some point in time you might be tempted to perform a Physical-To-Virtual conversion, also known as P2V.  The ability to create a complete working copy of a physical server as a virtual machine is really useful for migrating to a virtualized datacenter, but it can also wreak havoc in your environment if you use it to generate a copy of a server for testing and the only change you make is the name of the server.  The Problem: Consider that you...(read more)

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• An XEvent a Day (20 of 31) – Mapping Extended Events to SQL Trace

  - by Jonathan Kehayias

  One of the biggest problems that I had with getting into Extended Events was mapping the Events available in Extended Events to the Events that I knew from SQL Trace. With so many Events to choose from in Extended Events, and a different organization of the Events, it is really easy to get lost when trying to find things. Add to this the fact that Event names don’t match up to Trace Event names in SQL Server 2008 and 2008 R2, and not all of the Events from Trace are implemented in SQL Server 2008...(read more)

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• An XEvent a Day (27 of 31) – The Future - Tracking Page Splits in SQL Server Denali CTP1

  - by Jonathan Kehayias

  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 also blogged about Using XEvents (Extended Events) in SQL Server 2008 to detect which queries are causing Page Splits , but not in relation to Kalen’s blog...(read more)

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