Analyzing traces with RML Utilities

RML Utilities is a suite of tools that can be used to analyze and replay SQL Database Engine workloads. We first introduced the RML Utilities in Chapter 6, 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 multithreaded 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 test how a new version of the SQL Database Engine would perform with the same workload.

Another tool that is part of RML Utilities is ReadTrace. The ReadTrace tool is used to analyze and prepare traces for replay via ostress, but it can also be used to...