Tag Archives: RML

Upcoming Zeollar Presentation

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I will be presenting a 30 minute demo on how to perform post mortem analysis for SQL Performance issues using RML Utilities and SQL Nexus on 24th June, 2010. The recorded and live session will be available on Zeollar. Zeollar is a Microsoft India DPE initiative that gets you the latest technical content on a daily basis in different channels. Think of it like a personal television that switches on every day at a specified hour allowing you to switch channels and view the channel of your interest.

You can download the calendar invite from here.

Clarifying misconception about RML Utilities

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I remember in the past month addressing at least three different queries regarding RML Utilities on MSDN w.r.t. the co-relation between the Batches and Statements. Yes, it is true that a Batch will have one or more T-SQL statements. But if the statements do not have SP:StmtStarting and SP:StmtCompleted, then the Batch will not have an entry in the ReadTrace.tblStatements. This is documented in the RML Utilities help file. 

You can verify if the trace has any SP:StmtStarting or SP:StmtCompleted using the following query: 

  

 

select count(*) from fn_trace_gettable ('<trace file with full path>',null) where eventclass in (44,45)

From the help file: 

ReadTrace.tblStatements 

This table contains one row for each SP:StmtStarting or SP:StmtCompleted event in the trace. Similar to the ReadTrace.tblBatches table, the completed event is stored when it is available. Otherwise, the starting event is saved so that you can tell that a query was running when the trace was stopped. 

RML Utilities OR ReadTrace

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The Microsoft Download site has a tool called RML Utilities which can be used to process the profiler traces collected from a SQL Server instance.
SQL Profiler Traces are very helpful when we need to perform a Bottleneck Analysis in any SQL environment or you need to find out the before & after picture. But the daunting task remains in analyzing the Profiler Traces because the size and volume of the trace files.

SQL Server provides an in-built function fn_trace_gettable() to load the collected profiler traces into a SQL Server database table.
Then you can run queries on this table to draw inferences from the profiler traces collected during that period. Lets say you wanted to find out all queries that had a duration above 10,000 and group the results by host name, then you could write a query in the following manner:

SELECT hostname, count(*) as counts
FROM tbl_trace
WHERE Duration > 10000
GROUP BY hostname

This is a tool that is used by Microsoft PSS to analyze SQL Server Profiler Traces collected by the PSSDIAG utility.

For more details, please refer:
Replay Markup Language
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=944837
RML Utilities (x86) Download
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=7EDFA95A-A32F-440F-A3A8-5160C8DBE926&displaylang=en
RML Utilities (x64) Download
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=B60CDFA3-732E-4347-9C06-2D1F1F84C342&displaylang=en