Analyzing traces with RML Utilities

Replay Markup Language Utilities, or RML Utilities as it's more commonly known, is a suite of tools that can be used to analyze and replay SQL Server workloads. We first introduced the RML Utilities in Chapter 7, Discovering T-SQL Anti-Patterns in Depth in the Avoiding unnecessary overhead with stored procedures section where we used the ostress tool to simulate a multi-threaded workload on the server. The input to ostress can be a single query or T-SQL script, but ostress can also take a prepared trace file (either SQL Trace or XEvents) as input. This allows you to capture a workload from a production server, and then replay that workload on a test server so that you can experiment with various settings or performance tuning options, or even to test how a new version of SQL Server would perform with the same workload.

The Database Experimentation...