Here is the update: I did better.

Extended Events

I did a little more multi-tasking this month, ensuring that if I rode the stationary bike for exercise, I had my tablet and watched some Pluralsight or read some content.

Here I learned a few things:

Predicates

These short circuit, and this means that we want to write our predicates to end early if possible. We also want to write our predicates to look at local data before global data so that we can stop event code as early as possible.

There is also a 3000 byte limit, so be careful with structuring the event predicate statement.

I also found that u_tables.sql lets me rebuilt the default sessions for an instance. It’s in the install folder. That’s handy as there are times that I’ve removed the default sessions or changed them and I’d like to get back to the beginning.

Event Sessions

The structure for event sessions is like DDL for other objects. These are always created with events, but we can remove all events. I’m not sure why you want the placeholder, but it’s an interesting anomaly. I suspect that this is a hole in the DDL parser.

I also learned you can drop sessions without stopping them. Convenient? Sure. However, this means that I could make a mistake and not get a question about dropping a session that I, or someone else, is using.

Changing event or target configuration means dropping and adding back the item. That’s good to know. No way to alter an event predicate.

Python

I made it a point to do some coding every week, and work on Python. I did some fundamentals, ensuring I understood how modules work and are imported. I spent some time on variables and mutable/immutable items. I wanted to be sure I understood how these worked compared to other variables. It’s good to know that some of the assignments don’t create a new variable, but merely set a pointed to the existing item.

I set up a Jupyter notebook in Azure, which was interesting. I need to use this more, and perhaps do some coding here on the Advent of Code or other projects. I solved a couple more days of puzzles, which was fun. These are challenging, and it took a little time to work through items.

I didn’t do this every week, as I had some travel this month, but I did make an effort to work in python a bit more.