Bringing It All Together with SQL Nexus - SQL Server 2012 Internals and Troubleshooting - page 328

Figure 12-1 displays the Tasks option (on the left)
which provides you with the option to import
the data using the Import link. After clicking
this option, you will be presented with the Data
Import dialog shown in Figure 12-2.

There are three importers for SQL Nexus, as
shown in Figure 12-3.
➤

FIGURE 12-2

BLG Blaster — This imports the
PerfMon and sysmon i les that you
collect as part of your data collection
into two tables (refer to Chapter 10
for more information about how to
capture data with PerfMon):
➤

FIGURE 12-3

[dbo].[CounterData] — Stores the performance counter data which was collected
by SQLdiag or another performance monitoring tool

➤

[dbo].[CounterDetails] — Stores information about the counters that were
coni gured for the data collection

➤

ReadTrace — This importer uses ReadTrace.exe to import the data from SQL Traces into
the SQL Nexus database. All the imported data from the SQL Traces is available in the
objects under the ReadTrace schema.

➤

Rowset Importer — This importer parses the output of the T-SQL scripts and imports
them into the relevant database tables. Output from the SQL Server Perf Stats script
(see Chapter 11) makes up the bulk of the data imported into the SQL Nexus database
tables.

NOTE Currently, no reports are available for the Performance Monitor data that
is imported into the SQL Nexus database. You can either write T-SQL queries
to view and aggregate the import data or create your own custom reports for
viewing the PerfMon data.

Loading Data into a Nexus Database
Every time you launch SQL Nexus you're presented with a dialog to connect to SQL Server. The
SQL Server instance to which you connect is used to store the results from processing a data
collection. SQL Nexus is an “ofl ine” analysis tool, which means it analyzes data that has already
been collected.

When you connect to a SQL Server instance, SQL Nexus looks for a database called “sqlnexus.” If
it is found, then the Recovery Model is set to Simple to ensure that the transaction log doesn't need
to be managed through transaction log backups during the data import process. If the sqlnexus
database doesn't exist, then one is created with a 50MB data i le.