Tag: Auditing

Part of the DBA-Tools Project. An Extended Events session you stood up for a decommission audit, a login trace, or a stored procedure profile isn’t meant to run forever. Once you’ve got the evidence, it’s just overhead, disk space, buffer memory, and one more thing a future DBA has to figure out the purpose of.…

Part of the DBA-Tools Project. Standing up a trace session is the easy part. The actual decision, is this database safe to decommission, is that service account still connecting from the right host, comes from reading the results back and turning raw events into an answer. Extended Events writes to rolling .xel files, and reading…

Part of the DBA-Tools Project. Extended Events sessions have a way of quietly accumulating on a busy instance. Someone stood up a trace for a specific investigation six months ago, and it’s still running, still writing files, and nobody remembers why. Before you start a new session, or clean up an old one, you need…

Part of the DBA-Tools Project. Query Store and the plan cache tell you what’s expensive. Neither tells you what’s actually called, by what, how often. Before a migration, you need to know which stored procedures matter in practice, not which ones look interesting in a cached plan that might not even be current anymore. Before…

Part of the DBA-Tools Project. “I think nothing uses this database anymore” is not evidence. It is a guess, and it is the kind of guess that turns into an incident report when the thing you dropped turns out to be feeding a monthly finance job nobody remembered. Proving a database is genuinely unused takes…

Part of the DBA-Tools Project. “Who actually connects to this server?” is a question you can’t answer from documentation. Not who’s supposed to connect, who is. Ownership changes, connection strings get copied into three other applications nobody told you about, and a service account keeps authenticating from a box that was decommissioned eighteen months ago.…