dotnet / dotnet/docs

Data Tracing in ADO.NET typically produces no useful results based on the supplied files.

Open
#33,977 2 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub
:watch: Not Triaged
Dominant language
No language data
Stars
4.8k
Forks
6.1k
Avg merge
15h 21m
Merged PRs (30d)
370

Description

**Issue description**
The article [Data Tracing in ADO.NET](https://github.com/dotnet/docs/blob/main/docs/framework/data/adonet/data-tracing.md) links back to the old "Data Access Tracing in SQL Server 2012" article which supplies files, but then links back to the "Data Access Tracing in SQL Server 2008" article to provide the instructions.

The issue is that the provided files seem to set the verbosity level to **ZERO** for most of the providers in the "Control_GUID_Files" which produces no useful results. Changing it (the last numeric column) to a value from 1 through 5 actually produces helpful output. Unfortunately, this is not mentioned anywhere, that I could determine, in the supplied documentation or files. This caused me to waste many hours as I thought I was doing something wrong.

Only by finding what others had done by going over miscellaneous websites, was I able to piece this together. Eventually I found one site that explicitly talked about this [Diagnosing ADO.NET with ETW traces - Start ADO.NET tracing - verbosity](https://lowleveldesign.wordpress.com/2012/09/07/diagnosing-ado-net-with-etw-traces/#:~:text=The%200xFFFFFFFF%20value%20selects%20all%20events%20generated%20by%20the%20provider%20and%205%20sets%20the%20log%20verbosity%20level%20to%20the%20most%20detailed%20one).

I realize it is unlike that the old documentation could be changed, but a footnote on this supported page that provides this critical detail would be better than nothing. Note that the first page that I had found originally was the SQL Server 2008 page, but after some searching I found the 2012 page, and then this supported page which is what i wanted to find. If there is updated documentation elsewhere, I was unable to find it, but it would be great if this page pointed at it.

**Target framework**
- [X] .NET Framework v4.8

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

Assessment

This issue has not been assessed yet.

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.