There are four different ways you can get information about deadlocks in your system. These are:
- traceflag 1204
- traceflag 1222
- trace events
- extended events
For years I’ve been pushing traceflag 1222 as the best of the lot. Well, that’s over. I’ve been learning more and more about extended events and I’m currently in love with xml_deadlock_report event. Why? Simple, it has everything that traceflag 1222 has, but there are two glorious things about it.
First, it’s not going to be filling up my error log with, for the error log, noise. Seriously. As much as I liked the information displayed from traceflag 1222, I didn’t like what it did to the log, but I saw it as a necessary evil.
Second, it’s XML baby! That means you can set up queries to pull information out if you need to. Yeah, I know you can hop through hoops to set up the text from the error log for querying, but, that’s nothing like pointing to the file and referencing the nodes. Way too cool.
On top of that, for simple deadlocks, the graphical version of the deadlock graph gives you most of what you need to quickly identify the issue. You absolutely don’t get that with the traceflag.
Nope. I’m sold more than ever on extended events. If you haven’t started exploring them, I strongly recommend you do. Especially with SQL Server 2012 just around the corner. The functionality around extended events there completely makes these things accessible in ways they weren’t before.
