Filter extended events by affected table?

Question

I am working with extended events in SQL Server 2008 to perform some monitoring. I am mostly interested in the following events:

• sqlserver.sp_statement_completed
• sqlserver.sp_statement_starting
• sqlserver.sql_statement_completed
• sqlserver.sql_statement_starting

I would like to know if it is possible to filter out these extended events according to the table(s) they affect. I have not seen any predicate that would help me perform such filtering. Since a single stored procedure might actually affect multiple tables, I am not even sure how they would do it, but someone out there might have thought of some neat trick.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Nope, there is nothing in SQL Server 2008 that will allow you to attempt to do this as a part of the session definition, but you could do it as a part of post event processing if you use track_causality=on and you add in the sqlserver.lock_aquired event for schema stability locks at the object level only and then filter on the object_id of the objects that you want to target. Then you have to do the filtering based on the activity_xref_id and you can throw out the starting/compleded events for those activity_xref_ids that don't have an associated sqlserver.lock_acquired event with them. This would work but it is complex and would capture a lot of additional noise data as well.

Come to think of it, you could also just use the sqlserver.lock_acquired event with the sqlserver.sql_text and sqlserver.tsql_stack actions to be able to do the same thing with less noise.
Are there specific data elements returned by the starting/completed events that you want to be able to correlate with accessing a specific object, or do you just want to know the SP's and adhoc SQL that access a specific object in a database?

Let me know some more specifics and I'll see if I can work up a demo that shows this for you.