Over the course of this stairway series, we're going to explore in detail the use of Extended Events as a diagnostic data collection tool, to track down causes of poor performance in SQL Server. This first level will start from a point known and familiar to many DBAs, namely the use of SQL Trace to track down and investigate long-running queries.
2021-12-22 (first published: 2015-12-23)
14,492 reads
In this Level, we'll walk through the basics of using the New Session dialog in the UI to create a new event session, define its events, actions and predicates, and establish a target for the session in which to collect the event data.
2021-11-24 (first published: 2016-01-13)
8,431 reads
In the next installment of our stairway to Extended Events, we delve into the Live Data and Target Data Viewers.
2021-02-24 (first published: 2016-05-25)
6,262 reads
In this level, we're going to dig a little deeper into the Extended Events engine, its architecture, and fundamental components. It will give you a deeper understanding of why, in general, an Extended Events session is inherently lower in overhead than an equivalent SQL Trace. We'll also investigate how to design our event sessions to minimize any unnecessary overhead during event data collection, even when we need to create relatively complex event sessions to investigate difficult performance problems.
2018-11-28 (first published: 2016-08-17)
4,833 reads
If you have not been capturing baselines on your production servers, then today is the day you can start. This article provides scripts, valid for SQL Server 2005 and higher, which anyone can use to capture basic information about a SQL Server instance.
2017-02-20 (first published: 2012-11-27)
37,188 reads
Today we have a guest editorial from Erin Stellato that reminds us that we have had support from many, and it's important to thank them from time to time.
2015-12-04
157 reads
By capturing baseline data, a well-prepared DBA should get a good idea of what potential issues they will face. In this article Erin Stellato looks at Wait Statistics and what they can tell you about your databases.
2015-07-17 (first published: 2013-02-04)
20,106 reads
It is widely acknowledged within the SQL Server community that baselines represent valuable information that DBAs should capture. Unfortunately, very few companies manage to log and report on this information, and DBAs are then forced to troubleshoot from the hip and scramble to find evidence to prove that the database is not the problem. This article will make a compelling argument for why DBAs must start capturing baseline information, and will create a roadmap for subsequent posts.
2014-10-17 (first published: 2012-11-19)
21,784 reads
In this article, we'll tackle the topic of monitoring disk space usage. By tracking how much is in use and how much is still available, over time we'll have the data we need for better capacity planning, and can ensure that a database won't ever run out of disk space.
2013-01-23
10,324 reads
If you spend your days tuning queries, managing pipelines, or keeping a production database...
I’ve been rebuilding my three-site SQL Server demo lab, and I ran into something...
By SQLPals
SQL Server gMSA: Why DBAs Still Aren't Using It in 2026 ...
Putting this here as we're currently on SQL Server 2019 installed on Windows Server...
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Never is Not the Policy
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I have added a few indexes to one of my tables in SQL Server 2025:
ALTER TABLE dbo.CustomerContact
ADD CONSTRAINT PK_CustomerContact
PRIMARY KEY (CustomerID);
-- Create index on CustomerEmail
CREATE INDEX IX_CustomerContact_CustomerEmail
ON dbo.CustomerContact (CustomerEmail);
CREATE INDEX IX_CustomerContact_CustomerEmail
ON dbo.CustomerContact (phone);
I then do this to disable one index:
alter index IX_CustomerContact_CustomerPhone on dbo.CustomerContact disableI see this when I check the index status:
I decide to rebuild all indexes with this command:
ALTER INDEX ALL ON dbo.CustomerContactAfter I do this, what will I see for the index status? See possible answers