SQLDIAG is a data collection utility that is used for collecting T-SQL script output, perfmon data and profiler traces in a consolidated manner. This allows the database administrators for collect a single output without having to configure multiple data collection utilities for capturing the required data.

SQLDIAG has been shipping with the SQL Server product since SQL Server 2005. Now the reason I am writing this post is to talk about a specific issue that you can encounter when you already have a previous version of SQLDIAG installed on your machine along with SQL Server 2012.

Using the command below I am trying to execute a SQLDIAG data collection using a specific SQL Server 2012 SQLDIAG configuration file. The command that I used was to specify the output folder and the default SQLDIAG configuration file available at C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\110\Tools\Binn\SQLDiag.XML:

C:\>sqldiag /O "F:\Temp\SQLDIAG Output" /I "C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\110\Tools\Binn\SQLDiag.XML"

The output that I got was:

SQLDIAG Output path: F:\Temp\SQLDIAG Output\

SQLDIAG Invalid SQL Server version specified.  SQL Server version 11 is not supported by this version of the collector

SQLDIAG . Function result: 87. Message: The parameter is incorrect.

The reason for the above issue is that my environment PATH variable has the path for a previous version of SQLDIAG listed before the path of the SQL Server 2012 SQLDIAG. My path variable has the directory “C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100\Tools\Binn\” listed before “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SQL Server\110\Tools\Binn\” which is the default location of the SQLDIAG utility. The PATH variable is updated with the SQL specific directories during a SQL Server installation. In my case, I have a SQL Server 2008 R2 instance installed on my box. So the configuration file which specifies a data collection for a SQL Server 2012 is failing because I am using a SQLDIAG from a SQL Server 2008 R2 installation.

If I executed the following command, then my SQLDIAG initialization will work correctly:

"C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\110\Tools\Binn\sqldiag.exe" /O "F:\Temp\SQLDIAG Output" /I "C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\110\Tools\Binn\SQLDiag.XML"

To summarize, you need to full qualify your SQLDIAG executable path when collecting SQLDIAG data from a machine which has multiple versions of SQLDIAG installed on the machine.