You can do a lot with Extended Events

I’m really looking forward to the stuff in 2016 becoming mainstream in 2020 or so. Raise your hand if you’re using SQL Server 2014 in production. Raise your hand if your vendor supports SQL Server 2014.

Okay then.

When you open up the New Session dialog to create event session, the default screen has a nearly overwhelming amount of stuff in it. It’s good that you can search for things, but the search is kind of iffy. Not all words hit, even if you spell them right.

Assuming things

You’d think that with Trace being deprecated and XE being the new hotness on the block, that everything would be up front to help you find what you need, expose some cool functionality, and ideally get you started trying to parse the Codd forsook hunks of XML that session data is stored in. But no. You gotta go hunting for that, too.

What’s in there?

Everything. Literally everything. Every weird and awesome thing you can imagine. Seriously, go look. If I started writing a list, I’d just list everything in there.

Thanks for reading!