SQL Server 2012 New Performance Tuning Tools

Who am I? Menzo Steinhorst Senior Premier Field Engineer SQLRAP, WS+ SQL Server Performance Tuning, WS+ SQL Server 2008 Admin, WS SSIS 2008 for DBAs Focus area: Performance Tuning SQL Server Introduction

Agenda New Tools and Features Overview XEvents (Extended Events) Introduction Practical Uses

New Tools and Features Performance Data Warehouse Faster Spatial Performance Paging for Result Sets Partitioning Faster Full Text Search Column Store Index Distributed Replay XEvents

What is XEvents? A general event-handling system There since SQL Server 2008 Foundation of auditing Used for problem diagnosis and info gathering Engine lives in sqlserver.exe Consumers can be in-proc or out of proc ETW consumer is provided Enables correlation between SQL Server and Windows trace information. But....classic provider. Not very useful!

Extended Events in SQL Server 2012 SQL Trace (Profiler) is on the deprecated list! See Mike Wachal blog: Migrating from SQL Trace to Extended Events Extended Events are supported in SSMS Extended Events included in SMO Extended Events object model Extended Events in PowerShell provider

SQL Server Diagnostics SQL Server pre-2008 supports: Performance monitor counters Counters are cumulative Little/no buil in filtering SQL Profiler Granular events Column filters Automated via server-side trace queues SQL DMVs and DMFs Detailed No persisted info Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) Exposed profiler events

Demo XPerf

SQL Server 2012: Extended Events come of age! Extended Events Less overhead than server-side trace queues Single event cost is ~2us on a 2GHz processor Event and consumer agnostic Any event can be processed by any consumer New events can be added, immediatly useable Allow actions to be taken when an event fires Additional information can be included Rich predicate system for filtering

Extended Events Explained Event sessions specify Events The actual trigger The payload of the event Actions The extra data that is collected Targets Where you send the data

Demo XEvent GUI in SQL 2012

XEvents Targets Old Target NameNew Target Name asynchronous_file_targetevent_file synchronous_event_counterevent_counter asynchronous_bucketizerhistogram synchronous_bucketizer etw_classic_sync_target pair_matching ring_buffer event_stream

Demo Targets

XEvents Predicates Filters are server-side Occurences of events can be restricted pred_source object types counter and partitioned counter

Demo Predicates

Practical Uses: Troubleshooting Blocking Demo

Practical Uses: Page Splits Page Splits Explained

Practical Uses: Tracking Session and Statement Level Waits 2 Events: wait_info For SQLOS controlled resource wait_info_external Occurs when a SQLOS Task switches to preemptive mode.

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