SQLWATCH 2.6

Bug fixes

• fixed a bug in a retention job that was causing it not to delete anything
• fixed checks engine not respecting the check frequency due to time zone discrepancy, causing all checks to run every time regardless of the frequency setting in some time zones
• fixed syntax in check -17 causing it to fail

SQLWATCH 2.5

• Fixed an issue where table utilisation was not beinG collected for databases other than SQLWATCH. As all tables are being processed now, the execution time for [dbo].[usp_sqlwatch_logger_disk_utilisation_table] may increase considerably. Please test it in your environment first.

SQLWATCH 2.4

• Many bug fixes and improvements behind the scenes.
• ERRORLOG collection. Define keywords you'd like to monitor in [dbo].[sqlwatch_config_include_errorlog_keywords]
• sys.configuration audit to track configuration changes.
• Changes to the initial SQLWATCH configuration:
  • INFO messages will NOT be logged by default to reduce the size of the [dbo].[sqlwatch_app_log] table.
  • [dbo].[sqlwatch_app_log] retention changed to 7 days
  • batched up [dbo].[sqlwatch_app_log] retention to prevent blowing up the transaction log
• Initial integration with DBACHECKS to be able to show failed checks on the SQLWATCH dashboard.
• Fixed trends job that was spilling to tempdb and blowing it up.
• Improved date hierarchy on the dashboard that now allows selecting year->month->day->hour->minute
• Tested with Power BI May 2020 release.

SQLWATCH 2.3

• [Bugfix] Fixed an issue where agent jobs would not be alerted on in different time zones.
• [Bugfix] Fixed a PK violation for tables with compressed and uncompressed indexes (i.e. column store and row store).
• [Bugfix] Fixed handling of US date formats.
• [Bugfix] Fixed collector timeout error.
• [Bugfix] Fixed arithmetic overflow in dbo.vw_sqlwatch_report_fact_whoisactive
• [Bugfix] Fixed FK violation in dbo.sqlwatch_logger_repository_import_status
• [New] Aligned naming of config procedures. They should now be more transparent.
• [New] Removed index compression indicator from table entity as this is reported in the index entity
• [New] Excluded model database from default collection.
• [New] Moved off sp_MsForEachDb.
• [New] Improved logging.
• [New] Implemented database inclusion and exclusion to match Ola Hallengren standard: Include only databases: @Database = 'DB1,DB2' or exclude specific database: @Database = '-DB3'. This is on top of existing exclusions specified in config tables and is is useful for ad-hoc runs.

SQLWATCH 2.2

• [New] functionality to raise alerts and send notifications (email, push) or perform remedial actions
  • Fully customisable and parameterised alerting engine with configurable templates
  • Self-checking mechanism with a number of pre-configured checks to ensure optimum SQL health.
  • Template-based reporting functionality to send scheduled reports with a number of preconfigured reports.
• [New] Ability to push collected data to the Azure Log Monitor
• [New] trend tables for very long term storage 2+ years with a reduced storage utilisation
• [New] Table size and row count collector
• [New] Baselines - the ability to display the same metrics offset by 1 day, 1 week or 1 month on the same dashboard.
• [New] Explicit exclusions to be able to exclude certain databases and tables from the collection
• [New] Explicit inclusions for the heavy collectors such as index histogram collection to only collect selected objects rather than everything - exclusion.
• [New] Ability to use Windows Task Scheduler to invoke collectors to make it work on SQL Express Edition and to use SQL Express as a central repository.
• [New] Ability to use the Linked Server instead of SSIS to pull data into the central repository.

...

• [Bugfix] fix handling of timezones.
• [Bugfix] allow indexes with the same name exist in different databases.
• [Bugfix] detect sp_whoisactive installed in the SQLWATCH database.
• [Bugfix] fix disk size overflow error on large disks.
• [Bugfix] fix formatting of storage units thank you PierreLetter.
• [Bugfix] fix SQL version not being pulled into the central repository
• [Bugfix] fix name of the SSRS database thank you halinegv

...

• Number of other improvements and tweaks
• Aligned wait stat categorisation with the tigertoolbox

SQLWATCH 2.1

1. Fixed Cartesian product bug introduced in 2.0
2. Re-worked PBI dashboard to remove custom data retrieval functions to utilise Direct Queries and benefit from Query Folding. It should now be also possible to deploy dashboard to the PBI Service and schedule it.
3. As part of this work, PBI schema was simplified and GUIDs are no longer required. I have therefore migrated keys from GUIDs to numerical values which saves the storage utilisation.
4. Further schema improvements reducing storage requirements by ~40-60%
5. Started adding views that serve pre-calculated data for reporting which can be fed into any dashboarding solution.
6. To improve reporting times, delta calculations have been pushed to the collector so all data is available in tables and no expensive calculation happen during reporting.
7. Some code cleansing and aligning with standard
8. Added config procedure to enable index compression, on top of the table compression introduced in 2.0
9. Removed unused indexes
10. Tweaked clustered keys for better performance
11. Normalised wait types
12. Removed calculations that are not used
13. Improved wait stats collection by the mean of capturing snapshots in stage tables to correctly calculate deltas between snapshots where the first snapshot had 0 wait time.
14. Started moving most of the business logic from PBI to the database tier
15. Re-worked SSIS to address schema changes
16. Improved central repository SSIS import as in some cases, it would try and collect data from remotes without having valid header which would cause FK violation.
17. Post deployment configuration is now applied automatically by a mean of triggering the relevant agent job

**Due to GUID migration it is not possible to directly upgrade from version 2.0 **

Documentation can be found at https://docs.sqlwatch.io

As always, please feedback any issues via GitHub Bug or on our Slack channel

SQLWATCH 2.0

Due to a bug creating duplicate table records, which creates a Cartesian product and causes exponential growth of downstream objects such as index stats and histogram I decided to pull this release until fixed as it could have some serious storage consequences. Apologies. Coding is hard.

Proud to announce the long overdue 2.0 release:

• Updated Dashboard
• Central repository with SSIS to pull data from remote instances
• New collectors: os_schedulers, extended events and SQL Agent history
• Unified and normalised schema
• Bug fixes
• UTC dates
• New configuration procedures
  Documentation can be found at https://docs.sqlwatch.io/

v2.0-beta6.2:
A lot and not a lot of changes.

• redesigned schema to accommodate server name as part of Primary Key for the central repository

That's it. PK changed in every table and procedure. Looks like small change but with a huge impact.

v2.0-beta5:

• [fixed] handle collation match in job deployment logic
• [fixed] address INT2 wait_stats overflow on busy systems
• [fixed] added XES collection steps to to the performance collector job
• [fixed] handling of empty wait_info recordset for default system_health session
• [fixed] improved deployment of multi-step jobs
• [fixed] added index stats collector step to the index collector job
• [change] whoisactive job is now deployed disabled by default
• [new feature] Added default filter on whoisactive collector to only collect sessions lasting over 15 seconds. This is configurable as a parameter in the procedure.

SQLWATCH 1.3

v1.3.3

• Performance tweaks in [dbo].[ufn_time_intervals]

v1.3.2

[fixed] issue #47

[added] interrogate system_health extended event session to get information about long waits including query text, workers and long io requests.

[added] new snapshot (6) for query text with default 3-day retention

[added] new performance dashboard with lots of new tabs: Query statistics, memory, database performance, logical file performance, logical disk performance and generic performance counter analyser

[removed] dacpac from branches. these are binary files causing merge problems. dacpacs are now available in releases.

SQLWATCH 1.2

• [fixes] #52 hardcoded database name in one of the job steps breaking deployment via dbatools.io
• [fixes] #53 missing snapshot_type_id = 3 causing PK violation.

v.1.2.6841.38712 (2018-09-24)

SQLWATCH 1.1

• [added] new PowerBI dashboard to monitor disk utilisation
• [added] Win32_Volume logging via PowerShell
• [added] [dbo].[ufn_time_intervals] to address poor performance of time interval generation
• [removed] setup.sql as no longer supported
• [fixed] sp_spaceused logging pre SQL2016 (the @oneresultset problem)

v 1.1.6833.36316 (2018-09-17)