Extended Events In Azure SQL Database. For real.

UPDATE: Last month (Sept 2015), Extended Events (not just the metadata that I wrote about) are officially available in Azure SQL Database!! For more information, here’s the main documentation article.

I’ve just returned home after teaching two weeks of SQLskills Immersion Events. Total post-event exhaustion for two days. Trying to produce some nice demos on the new SQL Azure Database tiers and services for my SQL Azure Database A-Z preconference ssession at SQLTuneIn. And then this happens…

About a year or so ago, after attending a TechEd talk on XEvents in Azure SQL Database (ASD, the PaaS offering), I looked for and found metadata and blogged about it. The feature never seemed to come to fruition and after a while, I stopped looking.

This morning, I received email from Egbert Schagen, a person I’d met in my conference travels. He let me know that XEvents now appeared to work in ASD. They appeared in the SSMS object explorer. Egbert said he’d seen no announcement for it, and by web search he came across my old blog entry. He thought I might like to know. And he was right.

And so they DO work. I tried this in an Standard S1 Edition database I had and Egbert said they also worked in Web/Business edition. As with almost everything ASD, these event sessions exist at a database level, rather than in master.

There are 12 pre-configured event sessions. It doesn’t look like you can create your own. The sessions are:
azure_xe_activity_tracking*
azure_xe_errors_warnings
azure_xe_object_ddl
azure_xe_post_query_detail
azure_xe_pre_query_detail
azure_xe_query
azure_xe_query_batch*
azure_xe_query_detail*
azure_xe_query_execution*
azure_xe_query_waits*
azure_xe_query_waits_detail*
azure_xe_waits

The event sessions with an asterisk can be turned on and you can “Watch Live Data” in SSMS. The rest of them look like they require a credential because they write to Azure blob storage. More on that as I try and figure through this with the metadata. It appears you can only run one event session at a time. The second concurrent one always produces a “system is currently busy” message on attempting to start it.

I’m not sure what the “official” status is, but for now it looks like you *can* trace in Azure SQL Database. Great! Thanks, ASD developers. Thanks, Egbert.

@bobbeauch

One thought on “Extended Events In Azure SQL Database. For real.

  1. Hi
    Thanks for that – i was just about to blog about it too… 🙂
    it is only in 2014 SSMS… and yes we want 2 at a time 🙂

    thanks
    Pini

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