SQL Server Snippets | Paul Hewson

The filtering on Windows event logs can be slow, clunky and although you can do it on fields like event ID, it seems that many event IDs are shared amongst many different errors – the event ID may match but the body of the error (therefore the actual error) may be completely unrelated. Fortunately, it is possible to filter on the contents of the body of the error message but it requires creating a custom XML query. Also, it would be handy to send out a notification email when this event gets logged. Read on to find out how to work this magic…. This example is looking for a  Warning  event  1309  for  ASP.NET 4.0.30319.0  on a web server. If you were to just filter the log on the criteria above today it would return 435 results because it is a fairly general error ID. If I filter it using XML for SqlException (what I’m really interested in) only 5 results are returned. So the first step is go to the Application Log and choose  Create Custom View… ...

(Or how to import the StackOverflow database into SQL Server) Introduction NB  This process can be generalised to import any large (>2G) xml file into SQL Server. Some SQL Server training you can find online including that by Brent Ozar uses the StackOverflow database for practice. The tables from it are available online for download in xml format. In the past it was possible to use the scripts found here, https://www.toadworld.com/platforms/sql-server/w/wiki/9466.how-to-import-the-stackoverflow-xml-into-sql-server , to import them but as each xml file is now over 2GB you will get an error like this when you try to execute them: Brent Ozar, has a link to SODDI.exe, https://github.com/BrentOzarULTD/soddi , which can import the files (I haven’t tried it) but it means downloading and importing eight tables: Badges, Comments, PostHistory, PostLinks, Posts, Tags, Users, and Votes tables which amounts to >30GB of compressed xml increasing to ~200GB when deco...