Sometimes I like to see and know what SQL server is doing under certain operations and recently I wrote an extended events script to see what sort of I/O patterns my query was doing (This is a fun post). The important event here is sqlserver.file_read_completed.
I clear cache and let the fun begin.
Last year I wrote about Azure SQL Database extended events (https://blobeater.blog/2017/02/06/using-extended-events-in-azure/) and gave an example where I was capturing deadlocks via the ring buffer. Ever since then I wanted to do a follow-up post but using Azure storage as the target for my XEL files.
This is more complicated than using the ring buffer as the target and requires a couple of things:
Over the past 6 months I have been trying to push myself to use extended events (XEvents) over SQL trace, once you get past the learning curve it’s probably the way to go. If you are operating in the Azure space then you have no choice. Extended events are what you will need to use if you want to collect information against SQL database. There are some subtle differences on how you write the T-SQL between SQL database (Azure) and your locally installed SQL Servers.
All About Data 