Database Reference
In-Depth Information
As you can see, it defaulted to local storage on my server. You can specify an appropriate location on your system.
You can also decide whether you're using more than one file, how many, and whether those files roll over. All of those
are management decisions that you'll have to deal with as part of working with your environment and your SQL query
monitoring. You can run this 24/7, but you have to be prepared to deal with large amounts of data depending on how
stringent the filters you've created are.
In addition to the buffer or the file, you have other output options, but they're usually reserved for special types of
monitoring and not usually necessary for query performance tuning.
Finishing the Session
Once you've defined the storage, you've set everything needed for the session. There is an Advanced page as well,
but you really shouldn't need to modify this from the defaults on most systems. If you click OK, the session will get
created. If you set up the session to start on the first tab, it will start immediately, but whether it starts or not, it will be
stored on the server. One of the beauties of Extended Events sessions is that they're stored on the server, so you can
turn them on and off as needed.
Assuming you either didn't automatically start the session or selected the option to watch the data live, you
can do both to the session you just created. Right-click the session, and you'll see a menu of actions including Start
Session, Stop Session, and Watch Live Data. If you start the session and you chose to observe the output, you should
see a new window appear in Management Studio showing the events you're capturing. These events are coming off
the same buffer as the one that is writing out to disk, so you can watch events in real time. Take a look at Figure
6-7
to
see this in action.
Figure 6-7.
Live output of the Extended Events session created by the wizard
