31Mar 2025 by Grant Fritchey 4 Comments

How Do You Pick Events in Extended Events?

SQL Server
A while back I wrote about using AI to explore why people are not using Extended Events. You can read all about it here, but a short summary of the biggest blockers would be: Familiarity (more comfort in Trace or DMVs) Lack of Knowledge (just don't know how it works) XML (I agree) Event Overload (there are just too many) For this blog post I want to focus on the last one, Event Overload. There really are a lot of events in Extended Events. I don't just think that's a good thing. I think it's a GREAT thing. However, I get it. I hit the same problem, regularly. Which events do I use to do thing that I'm trying to do? Except for blogs like this one, there's not always…
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05Aug 2024 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

PostgreSQL and Instrumentation

PostgreSQL
I'm still learning PostgreSQL and one of the things I've been looking at a lot lately is instrumentation. What do I mean? Well, if you're in SQL Server, think, Dynamic Management Views (DMV), Extended Events, Query Store, <hack, spit> Trace <spit>. How do we know how long a query took to run? PostgreSQL can tell you, but, and this is one of those wild, cool, but, honestly, slightly frustrating things about PostgreSQL, not natively. Let's talk about it. Instrumentation If you connect up to a PostgreSQL database, you actually do have the equivalent of DMVs. It's called the Cumulative Statistics System. And yeah, it's a bunch of views on a bunch of functions. It displays all sorts of data about IO, tables, indexes, etc.. It will even show you acive…
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