I know this is the holiday season for many of us (which ones depend on your religion and nationality of course) but let’s make one more push. This month I’d like you to take a look at the default trace and the system health extended events session. Last month I had you looking at the built in reports in SSMS because they have a ton of great information and can be really convenient. Well these have even more information, some of which you won’t find anywhere else, but they aren’t all that convenient. On top of that they have a fixed amount of rolling storage so the information goes away over time. In fact depending on the level of activity of the server the information in the default trace can go away within less than a day. That means that if there is something in there you need, you need to get to it pretty quickly. Combine that with the difficulty of getting to the information means you’d best have some practice.

So take some time this month and review what information is available (for example the deadlock graphs), run some tests, and read the data.