DMV to Replace DBCC INPUTBUFFER Command � Interview Question of the Week #100

December 4, 2016
Pinal Dave
SQL Interview Questions and Answers
1 Comment
Question: Is there any way to replace DBCC INPUTBUFFER Command?

Answer: In a recent interview, I heard this question and it caught me off guard.
Honestly, when I heard this question being asked to interview candidates. Honestly
the candidate did not know the answer and I had decided that I will write about it
when I return home. When I was back home, I noticed there is SQL Server 2016 SP1
released.

DMV to Replace DBCC INPUTBUFFER Command - Interview Question of the Week #100
100thquestion-800x418

I have always seen that new releases bring new functionalities and that is an
awesome opportunity for us to learn something new. Having said that, when SQL
Server 2016 SP1 got released, I personally felt this was no ordinary release. There
were several interesting features and enhancements (though small) were getting
added. Many look trivial and sometimes makes us think why this was not there
before? Why didn�t Microsoft not add these capabilities into the product? Those
questions are beyond the scope of this blog. I am happy and glad that this is
happening. The new Microsoft is agile and has a fresh perspective. One such big
thing is �SQL on Linux�. I do want to play and blog about it, this discussion is
for some other time.

Solarwinds
Coming back to core content for this blog. When things go wrong in SQL Server, one
of the things that I have seen DBA�s do is to query the sp_who, sp_locks etc and
find which connection is waiting or blocking state. Then given the connection
number, they also use the DBCC INPUTBUFFER command to find what statements are
running for that session. I have always found this two-step process less
convoluted.

Welcome SQL Server 2016 SP1, we now have an interesting DMV added
(dm_exec_input_buffer). The usage of it would look like:

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SELECT es.session_id, ib.event_info
FROM sys.dm_exec_sessions AS es
CROSS APPLY sys.dm_exec_input_buffer(es.session_id, NULL) AS ib
WHERE es.session_id > 50
GO
The output looks like this:

DMV to Replace DBCC INPUTBUFFER Command - Interview Question of the Week #100 dbcc-
inputbuffer-dmv-01-800x323

This command as you see is functionally equivalent to DBCC INPUTBUFFER. Having said
that there are advantages over DBCC INPUTBUFFER tough. Some to mention, this
command directly returns a rowset, it can be conveniently used with
sys.dm_exec_sessions or sys.dm_exec_requests by doing a CROSS APPLY as shown in the
example above and finally, it can use a simple query to retrieve input buffer of
multiple sessions without the need for a script and temp table.