SQL Server Consulting, Education, and Training
If this is the kind of SQL Server stuff you love learning about, you’ll love my training. I’m offering a 75% discount to my blog readers if you click from here. I’m also available for consulting if you just don’t have time for that, and need to solve database performance problems quickly. You can also get a quick, low cost health check with no phone time required.
I know there’s been a lot of blog content about the creation of and updates to my stored procedures lately. I try to consolidate as much as possible, but this one comes from Valued Contributor©.
The one, the only, the Canadian: Michael J Swart (b|t) recently contributed a really cool piece of code that I’ve been dying to have since I created sp_HumanEventsBlockViewer: the entire blocking chain is visualized in the results.
You don’t have to do anything special to see it, just run the procedure with the updated code, and off we go!
EXEC dbo.sp_HumanEventsBlockViewer
@session_name = N'insert an extended event capturing the blocked process report here please and thanks';
You’ll see a new column in the results that looks like this:
This will make troubleshooting long blocking chains a lot easier.
Thanks for reading!
If this is the kind of SQL Server stuff you love learning about, you’ll love my training. I’m offering a 75% discount to my blog readers if you click from here. I’m also available for consulting if you just don’t have time for that, and need to solve database performance problems quickly. You can also get a quick, low cost health check with no phone time required.
If this is the kind of SQL Server stuff you love learning about, you’ll love my training. I’m offering a 75% discount to my blog readers if you click from here. I’m also available for consulting if you just don’t have time for that, and need to solve database performance problems quickly. You can also get a quick, low cost health check with no phone time required.
SQL Server has incredibly verbose error logs, and sifting through them for the highlight reel can be a pain. They’re often full of messages that you aren’t actionable.
Making matters worse is that when you open large log files, the response time for loading all those messages can be painful, and even time out.
Then you have the nice folks who create a new log file every day and keep months of log files around.
But probably the worst thing is that you can’t really search for multiple things without losing all of the other messages.
If you’re like me, and you need to know when interesting or critical events happened, you’re going to love sp_LogHunter.
Right now, it has these parameters:
@days_back int = -7 /*How many days back you want to look in the error logs*/ @custom_message nvarchar(4000) = NULL /*If there's something you specifically want to search for*/ @custom_message_only bit = 0 /*If you only want to search for this specific thing*/ @language_id int = 1033 /*If you want to use a language other than English*/ @first_log_only bit = 0 /*If you only want to search the first log file*/
Along with the usual version, help, and debug parameters I add in to my procedures.
A sample execution looks something like this:
EXEC dbo.sp_LogHunter
@days_back = -30,
@custom_message = N'he''s dead, jim';
I’ll have a video walkthrough tomorrow to talk about the code and show some results in action.
If you run into any issues or would like to see any enhancements to the procedure, head over to GitHub to open an issue.
You get sp_LogHunter and raise any issues here.
Thanks for reading!
If this is the kind of SQL Server stuff you love learning about, you’ll love my training. I’m offering a 75% discount to my blog readers if you click from here. I’m also available for consulting if you just don’t have time for that, and need to solve database performance problems quickly. You can also get a quick, low cost health check with no phone time required.
If this is the kind of SQL Server stuff you love learning about, you’ll love my training. I’m offering a 75% discount to my blog readers if you click from here. I’m also available for consulting if you just don’t have time for that, and need to solve database performance problems quickly. You can also get a quick, low cost health check with no phone time required.
You’re not gonna wanna miss it! Registration is here.
If this is the kind of SQL Server stuff you love learning about, you’ll love my training. I’m offering a 75% discount to my blog readers if you click from here. I’m also available for consulting if you just don’t have time for that, and need to solve database performance problems quickly. You can also get a quick, low cost health check with no phone time required.
I couldn’t have said it better myself. Registration is here.
If this is the kind of SQL Server stuff you love learning about, you’ll love my training. I’m offering a 75% discount to my blog readers if you click from here. I’m also available for consulting if you just don’t have time for that, and need to solve database performance problems quickly. You can also get a quick, low cost health check with no phone time required.
If this is the kind of SQL Server stuff you love learning about, you’ll love my training. I’m offering a 75% discount to my blog readers if you click from here. I’m also available for consulting if you just don’t have time for that, and need to solve database performance problems quickly. You can also get a quick, low cost health check with no phone time required.
For this most recent T-SQL Tuesday, I challenged bloggers (using the term challenge weakly here) to think of the last time code they saw made them feel a feeling.
I wasn’t terribly specific about what kind of feelings were in play, and so I kind of expected some negative ones to creep in. Most of the results were overwhelmingly positive.
This challenge made me realize that code, like people, comes in all shapes and sizes. And that code, like music, has quite a wide audience. Some folks get down with the Bieber, and others need a full symphony to locate their jollies.
I’m not judging here, just making a casual observation. Just don’t wear a t-shirt of the language to the conference, and we’re still cool.
Anyway, on the roundup!
I’m curating these from the comment section of my post, in order. Here at Darling Data, we strive for fairness in all things.
If you wrote a post that didn’t ping back to me, or you didn’t leave a comment with the link, please let me know so I can add it here.
Thanks for reading!
If this is the kind of SQL Server stuff you love learning about, you’ll love my training. I’m offering a 75% discount to my blog readers if you click from here. I’m also available for consulting if you just don’t have time for that, and need to solve database performance problems quickly. You can also get a quick, low cost health check with no phone time required.
I recently found myself in the midst of a client issue that lead me to need a bunch of corroborating data from the system health extended event session.
There’s hardly any good documentation on it, and even fewer well-written queries or resources for parsing data out of it.
So now I’m making it easy for you, because I care about you more that Microsoft does.
If you need further proof of that, just look at the Query Store or Extended Events GUI.
Now look at sp_QuickieStore and sp_HumanEvents.
Who loves you, baby? I do.
Since this is currently in beta, it’s missing a lot of the bells and whistles that my other stored procedures have.
Right now, it just pulls all of the useful performance data out that I can get at:
I know that there’s gobs of data around errors and security and all that jazz, but that stuff is often irrelevant to what I’m trying to coax out of a SQL Server.
In the future, I’ll be doing what I can to make sure I’m pulling all of the performance-related event data that I can, and trying to add some analysis and additional filtering to each section.
If you have any feedback, please open issues on GitHub.
If this is the kind of SQL Server stuff you love learning about, you’ll love my training. I’m offering a 75% discount to my blog readers if you click from here. I’m also available for consulting if you just don’t have time for that, and need to solve database performance problems quickly. You can also get a quick, low cost health check with no phone time required.