Not long ago, I wrote a rather long article about a new-ish feature within SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) that impacted Extended Events. You can read that book – here! The XEvents Profiler feature is one of those things that you may or may not use. If you consider using the feature, I do believe it is important that you research it a bit and try to learn the pros and cons first.
With that there is a little more about the feature that the aforementioned book did not cover. In fact, this information has pretty much gone ignored and mostly stays hidden under the covers.
Settings
As of SSMS 17.4 we have been given the ability to control XEvents Profiler just a tiny bit more. For what it is worth, we as Database Professionals love to be able to control our database environment. So this teeny tiny bit of new control ability is potentially a huge win, right?
If you are the controlling type, or maybe just the curious type, you will be pleased to know that under “Options” from the Tools menu in SSMS, Microsoft has tucked some new control options to help you configure XEvents Profiler – to a degree. If you open options, you will see this new node.
If you expand the “XEvent Profiler” node (circled in red), you will discover the “options” node. If you click on this “options” node and do a quick comparison (in SSMS 17.4 and SSMS 17.5) you will also find that you don’t need t expand the “XEvent Profiler” node at all because the options are listed in the right hand pane for both nodes and they are exactly the same. So, choose one or the other and you will end up at the same place.
The options that you currently have are:
- Stop Session on Viewer Closed
- Toolbar commands stop and restart
You can either set these options to True or False. I recommend you play with them a bit to discover which you really prefer. That said, I do prefer to have the “Stop Session on Viewer Closed” set to true. There is “profiler” in the name of the feature afterall. And if you have read the “book” I wrote about this feature, you would know that the filtering offered by the default sessions of this feature basically turn on the fire hose effect and can have a negative impact on your server. Are you sure you want a profiler style fire hose running on your production server?
Conclusion
There surely will continue to be more development around this idea of an XE style profiler. More development generally means that the product will mature and get better over time. This article shows how there is more being added to the feature to try and give you better control over the tool. We love control so the addition of these options is actually a good thing. Is it enough to sway me away from using the already established, more mature, and high performing tools that have been there for several generations? Nope! I will continue to use TSQL and the GUI tools available for XE that predated the XEvent Profiler.
Some say this is a way of bridging the gap. In my opinion, that gap was already bridged with the GUI that has been available for several years. Some say that maybe this tool needs to integrate a way to shred XML faster. To that, I say there are methods already available for that such as Powershell, the live data viewer, the Target Data viewer, or even my tools I have provided in the 60 day series.
I would challenge those that are still unfamiliar with the XE GUI (out for nearly 6 years now) to go and read some of my articles or articles by Jonathan Kehayias about the power that is in XE as well as some of the power in the GUI.
