SQLWATCH 4.0

This release brings several bug fixes, improvements and new features. Following our naming convention, some of those improvements and fixes introduced breaking changes which means we must bump the version to 4.x as it impossible to upgrade from 3.x without migration scripts. If you are on 3.x or earlier version, you must deploy this release as a new database.

This release also brings several improvements to the way release notes are published and to the internal testing process. Hopefully from now on we should be able to release more often and with better release notes.

New Features

• Improved Backup Checks to be AG aware #289 #296 (#299 by @steffenengelhamburg)
• Added Long Queries to Grafana Dashboard (155efc7, ac00127 by @marcingminski)
• Improved way we store execution plans #297 #286 #295 (827db55, #291 by @marcingminski)
• Added ability to collect performance counters via CLR. This is experimental for now and not enabled and does not require CLR to be enabled unless you want to use this functionality. More details in #256 (1870cad, 58bd284, 98a2c9d, 2c1849e, 758c1c2 by @marcingminski)
• Ability to process checks on the central repository (#250 by @marcingminski)
• Query Problem XES disabled by default as does not yet work on 2012 (8556fcb, 00cc9bd, 6812f0f, b5b0ca4 by @marcingminski)
• New Grafana panel to show current and historical blocking chains (6b0afe3 by @marcingminski)
• Customisable baselines allowing to "freeze" data and prevent it from being deleted by the retention. Baselines can now be used in Checks as they can check for deviation from the baseline as well as deviation from the set value. Future releases will introduce changes to the Dashboards to be able to show them (7abde20, 03a9ebb, d6ef25e, 9e61e28, 942dd26, 72faa1a by @marcingminski)
• New collector: Exec Requests and Sessions (6be412a, 479aebf, 9a31d9d, 9c1202e, ba8d451 by @marcingminski)
• Ability to invoke collection via Service Broker. This functionality is not yet enabled by default. To migrate from Agent Jobs to Broker run exec dbo.usp_sqlwatch_internal_migrate_jobs_to_queues. There are several benefits to use broker as explained in my post https://sqlwatch.io/blog/announcements/were-moving-to-queues/ (#246 by @marcingminski)

Improvements

• Minor improvements to SqlWatchImporter.exe (#305 by @DavidBetteridge)
• Fix #286. I redesigned the way we store plans to make it more storage… (#290 by @marcingminski)
• Change SQLWATCH_long_queries dispatch latency from 5 seconds to 30 seconds as there is no need for instant collection of long running queries (39461f6 by @marcingminski )
• Change: Filter Name: SqlInstance Query in Azure Dashboards (#233 by @steffenengelhamburg)
• Performance tweaks and improvements to the blocking chains collector (d9fb345, 6aadfe3, 6874093, bcaeff5 by @marcingminski)
• Changed default blocking threshold to 5 seconds (262453c by @marcingminski)
• Change dispatch of SQLWATCH_blockers XES to 1 second to be able to capture chains as soon as they appear to show on Dashboard (35553e1 by @marcingminski)
• Added condition to check for SQL Agent when deploying SQLWATCH so if the agent is stopped, we will not attempt to deploy agent jobs as it would fail. They can be deployed later via stored procedure (cf87787 by @marcingminski)
• Tweaks to Grafana chart colours (66e7cae by @marcingminski)
• Performance improvements to Grafana Dashboards to reduce number of SQL Calls (291a86d, 0aa2356, 60900c8, a5bc3ef, c795567 by @marcingminski )
• Performance improvement to reduce re-compilation rates (b4e98c5, 71afc67 by @marcingminski)
• More intelligent index collect that should now collect index stats based on their age and configurable batch, giving better collection performance (25036d3 by @marcingminski)
• Performance improvements to the performance collector (c42dd23 by @marcingminski)
• Performance improvement to wait stats collector (b45e09b by @marcingminski)
• Performance improvement to only collect Ring Buffer data when there are new values rather than every 10 seconds (58141c6 by @marcingminski)

Bug Fixes

• Fix #303 (#304 by @marcingminski)
• Fix #294 reduced xes file size to 5MB (#298 by @marcingminski)
• Fix #287. Changed FK to reference correct table (#293 by @marcingminski)
• Fix #285. Fixed typo in the object name (#292 by @marcingminski)
• Fix #275 to handle divide by zero when delta seconds is null or zero (#282 by @marcingminski)
• Fix #266 (#283 by @marcingminski)
• fix #270 to handle agent jobs for default SQLWATCH installation (#281 by @marcingminski)
• Bug: Script.PostDeployment-CreateDefaultChecks.sql (#232 by @steffenengelhamburg)
• Fixed XES to work on 2012 and 2014 (#259 by @marcingminski)
• Fix #264
• Fixed CPU utilisation not being collected on SQL Standard (#261 by @marcingminski)
• Fixed issue where Ring Buffer values were hardcoded (488c7a4 by @marcingminski)
• Fixed collation in Post Deploy script (0954c61 by @marcingminski)
• Fixed ufn_sqlwatch_convert_datetimeoffset_to_local to make it work on 2012
• Fix #254
• Fix #253
• Fix #248
• Fix #247
• Fix #242
• Fix #244
• Fixed PK violation in usp_sqlwatch_logger_system_configuration #200 (#234 by @SiavashGolchoobian)
• Fixed data types in usp_sqlwatch_logger_disk_utilisation_os_volume (9b53be0 by @marcingminski)
• Fixed an issue where explicit data conversion was applied to a PK field that in rare cases could lead to mismatch in PK (e00d0e7 by @marcingminski)
• Fixed lock timeouts in usp_sqlwatch_internal_insert_header (66dad64 by @marcingminski)
• Redesigned trend collection that should address issue #215 (0654713, d4cd478 by @marcingminski)
• Fix #306 to address null tasks (#308 by @marcingminski)
• Fixed CHECK_ERROR count (01ea9ab by @marcingminski)
• Fixed counters with multiple instances not being aggregated correctly (0a1511e, by @marcingminski)

Maintenance

• fixed typos (#280 by @marcingminski)
• added config for capital MD extension (#279 by @marcingminski)
• Guidelines 1 (#278 by @marcingminski)
• added guidelines to satisfy automated release notes and testing (#277 by @marcingminski)
• Readme 1 (#276 by @marcingminski)
• update codacy badge (#273 by @marcingminski)
• Update README.md (#272 by @marcingminski)
• Add a Codacy badge to README.md (#271 by @codacy-badger)
• Main (#267 by @marcingminski)
• corrected some casing problems (#265 by @chrgraefe)
• Tweaks to build scripts (2dc9b2a by @marcingminski)
• updated docs (76cdf5e, 6e2fdea, 89c3aaf by @marcingminski)