I Nearly CREATED A ZOMBIE ARMY
From time to time, I’m going to share some of my brightest, shiniest dork moments in the hopes of sparing you from a similar fate. Only one of us should have to live these down, and since I’m in the trenches already, read this and save yourself.
You’re welcome.
So…….I was still relatively new to Extended Events and was working my way through the Events Wizard. I needed to set up a production-wide event to look for usage of a certain object. I was loving how easy the wizard made this. Why were people saying that Profiler would have to be pried out of their cold dead hands? This is fantastic! I’ll never use anything else!
I completed the wizard, ran my events successfully, stopped the XEs, and went on with life, blissfully ignorant of the horror that was getting ready to ensue.
Let me preface this next part by saying that I don’t care for anything to do with zombies. I don’t know why. I just don’t. No Walking Dead, no World War Z…..just no. I’m out. I run from zombies.
But as it turns out in SQL world, the zombies only had to bide their time and wait for me. Somehow, my dead XEs started randomly coming back to life and running by themselves! (Cue the Psycho theme here).
Wha??!?
Turns out, I had checked the nice little box that said, “Start the event session at server startup.” Well, yeah, I did! What if we’d had to bounce a server while my XE was running? I didn’t stop to think that it would start up after I had stopped the sessions. And no, I didn’t delete them (I might want to rerun them at some point, right?). I had unwittingly created zombie events that were pursuing me across production.
At least these zombies were easy to kill. And thus I learned that XEs are pretty cool, as long as you don’t make them into the undead. We have alerts now to tell us when the zombie apocalypse is beginning. It’s best to kill them early, you know.
But just to be clear, I still use Profiler a lot, too. They will have to pry it out of my cold, dead hands.