What is sysprocesses and what can it do for you?

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What is sysprocesses and what can it do for you?

edwardelliott

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April 30, 2009 at 10:59 pm

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SuperDBA-207096 SSCrazy Eights Points: 8176 More actions · Answer 1

Question - how does this relate to sp_who and sp_who2, and the activty monitor in SSMS?

Andrew..Peterson SSCertifiable Points: 6838 More actions · Answer 2

Thanks for a great review. For those of us who have been using sysprocesses as well as sp-who, sp_who2 for along time, it never hurts to have a review.

BTW.. sp_who & sp_who2 use info from sysprocesses.

sysprocesses goes back to the original Sybase design, so it has been around for a while.

The more you are prepared, the less you need it.

SanjayAttray SSChampion Points: 13157 More actions · Answer 3

Good review of sysprocess table. Every DBA should know about this table. Though I know a couple of ones who are used to using sp_who2 but does have no idea where the data comes from.

2005 and 2008 has an extra column request_id.

SQL DBA.

edwardelliott SSCommitted Points: 1863 More actions · Answer 4

Hi Mark,

Thanks Andrew and Sanjay.

The sysprocesses table is wrapped by sp_who* and the activity monitor but they do not give you as much detail, if you look at the definition for sp_who it is:

CREATE PROCEDURE sys.sp_who

select spid,

ecid,

status,

loginame=rtrim(loginame),

hostname,

blk=convert(char(5),blocked),

dbname = case

when dbid = 0 then null

when dbid 0 then db_name(dbid)

end

,cmd

,request_id

from master.dbo.sysprocesses

where spid >= @spidlow and spid <= @spidhigh

so it is useful but I think when troubleshooting issues knowing how to use sysprocessses and what everything means is essential.

It is also good for scripting because for instance you can join against itself on blocked = spid to get information on what queries are being blocked and also what it is that is blocking them.

Ed

Atif-ullah Sheikh SSChampion Points: 12495 More actions · Answer 5

What a co-incidence...

On thursday, I was struggling to get the Detailed information for each column in sys.sysprocesses. And here we are....

Very useful article, especially for me.

Thanks

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Wayne West SSC-Insane Points: 22586 More actions · Answer 6

A friend of mine wanted to conduct a license audit of her installation and used sysprocesses to get the info. On each server she created a DTS job that ran the following query:

select getdate() as StatsDate, ss.srvname as ServerName,

rtrim(db.name) as DBName, rtrim(hostname) as HostName,

rtrim(program_name) as ProgramName, rtrim(nt_domain) as Domain,

rtrim(nt_username) as UserName,rtrim(net_address) as MACAddress,

rtrim(loginame) as LoginName

from master..sysprocesses sp

join master..sysdatabases db

on sp.dbid = db.dbid

cross join master..sysservers ss

where sp.loginame 'sa'

order by db.name, hostname, loginame

then wrote it to a text file. She ran it at the top of the hour, on some days every 5 or 15 minutes, over an extended period of time and collected the scripts on her machine via a scheduled task that ran at 5 minutes after the hour that did this:

copy C:\SQLUserStats\ConnectionStats.txt + \\server1\c$\SQLUserStats\sqluserstats.txt C:\SQLUserStats\ConnectionStats.txt

copy C:\SQLUserStats\ConnectionStats.txt + \\server2\c$\SQLUserStats\sqluserstats.txt C:\SQLUserStats\ConnectionStats.txt

etc.

Worked like a charm. Suck the text file into a table and you can slice and dice the data to your heart's contentment.

One thing it would not show: if connections came through a gateway or application server that could spoof a MAC address or user name, you could have several dozen users hidden that you won't readily see. You also wouldn't see users who logged in for less than an hour and didn't cross that top of the hour boundary, so there were days that it ran every 15 minutes or every 5 minutes. Still, it was deemed adequate by her management to give a reasonable number of user connections.

Regardless, sysprocesses saved a whole lot of work for her.

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Yitzchok Lavi SSC Enthusiast Points: 144 More actions · Answer 7

Wayne West (5/5/2009)
A friend of mine wanted to conduct a license audit of her installation and used sysprocesses to get the info...

I'm doing something similar. I'm checking sysprocesses every 5 minutes to look for users with certain patterns.

I ended up here because I have been seeing one user whose sessions sometimes show up without a value in loginame! I used Profiler to watch logins and logouts and I see the session, and there is a value for the login name. When run from SSMS the query has never shown this blank loginame, but I do track it when the query is run from Server Agent.

Does anyone have any idea how a session could legitimately show up in sysprocesses without a loginame? And if I don't see it in that column can I get it from somewhere else? (the case I know about is an SQL user)