Automatically Gathering Server Information Part 1


Automatically Getting a Count of Database Users


There is a great deal of information about


SQL Server that may be of interest to you or your clients. I was

recently asked how to gather some statistical information for a SQL Server


its environment by a client. The person asking the question was wondering

whether to use Performance Monitor, stored procedures, or some other method

to get the

following information:

  • #users connected to each database
  • name of all databases
  • size of each database on disk (physical size)

Most of this information can be gathered using

Performance Monitor, with the exception of the first item. Performance

Monitor provides total users connected to the server, but not by database. In addition, if a

new database is added, the Performance Monitor chart or log settings must be

altered to add the new database instance to the database size object.

I do use Performance Monitor heavily to monitor my

database servers and see how they are performing. There are a number of data

points that performance monitor provides that I cannot get from another


There are a large number of articles written on how to use performance


and quite a few specific to SQL Server, so I will not delve into details


(If you need more information on Performance Monitor, see Brad

McGehee's series on this topic). I

view Performance Monitor more of a long term trending tool than a status

tool as

it is cumbersome to get the data from Performance Monitor into a format that


easily used (At least, for me it is a cumbersome process).

So that brings me to this article. I like getting

a daily status from my servers. A quick, concise view of what has happened

on the server over the last day. I try to keep this information to a minimum as

I do not have the luxury of being able to examine in detail how my servers are

doing everyday. Instead I only want errors or exceptions reported to me. The

less information I see everyday, the better. Of course I like to keep track

of things, but information management to prevent information overload is

becoming more important as the number of servers grow in my organization.

What kind of data can we gather?

So, lets get started. How can I get information

from my SQL Server? Well, let's pick a few data items to gather. How about

the following list my client asked for?

  • Total users per database
  • Total size of each database
  • Last Backup of each database

This is a pretty general list, though I would not

usually get the last backup on my servers. Instead, I would have some task

that alerted me if there was a problem with a backup, but for the example let's use this list.

I will tackle these items one by one. This article will tackle item # 1 with

#s 2 and 3 in follow-up articles.

Total Users Per Database

This is an interesting one, because the number of

users in a database is a snapshot statistic. The number of users is only

meaningful at some point in time because users log in and out of databases

constantly. In order for this to have some meaning you want it to include a

time stamp of when the count was made.

So, I still have not answered where we can get

this information. Microsoft has a couple of ways in which this can be done.

The recommended way to find out about users and databases is to use the sp_who

or sp_who2 stored procedures. These procedures return a list of all users and

the databases they are connected to. However, in order to get a count by

database, we would need to trap this information in a temporary table and then run a

query to select the information out of this table. The code for doing this is

given below:

     create table #users (
       spid int,
       status char( 40),
       loginname char( 100),
       hostname char( 100),
       blk int,
       dbname char( 40),
       cmd varchar( 200)
     -- load the table
     insert #users
      exec sp_who
     -- get the totals
     select dbname,
      from #users
      group by dbname
     drop table #users

Many people will realize that you could just as

easily get this information by querying against sysprocesses in the

following manner:

      from sysprocesses s, sysdatabases d
      where s.dbid = d.dbid
      group by dbname

This seems shorter and cleaner, so why not do

this? Well, I used to do this quite often in v6.5 to generate daily status

information. When v7.0 was released, a number of my stored procedures

stopped working after an upgrade. After digging in further I found that the

structure of some of the system tables changed. As a result I was no longer getting the

results that I expected, and in some cases the procedures would return


MORAL: If you can possibly avoid it, do not

use the system tables for queries. There is no guarantee that these will remain

the same over time. Instead, Microsoft has done a good job providing views and

stored procedures which you can query for information about the



The code batch above will return a snapshot


the count of users per database when it is run. However, I think this is of

limited use. So here are a few enhancements that I would make to this

batch. First I would make it a stored procedure so I can schedule it easily

using the SQL Agent. I feel that if there are any scripts that you run on a

regular basis, you are better off creating stored procedures out of them.


gives you a building block for stringing processes together.

My client wanted to know two things about


data. The maximum count of users for each database for the previous day, and


long term average. So next I would create a table in which to store the


That way I could query this each day for the previous days maximum as well


store this for long term trends. This changed the query statement as shown


     insert dbusage (dbname, usrcnt, entrydt)
      select dbname, count(spid), getdate()
       from #users
       group by dbname

To get the daily report back, we setup a

procedure to send the results of the following query through email to the


     select dbname,
            max( usrcnt) 'User_Count'
      from dbusage
      where entrydt > dateadd( day, case when datepart( dd, getdate()) = 2
                                         then -3
                                         else -1
                                   end, getdate())
   group by dbname

This returns the previous days (or previous 3

days if monday) count per database.

Now we can schedule the first code to run


minute or so during the day and store the information. There is a flaw in


system in that if a user logs in and then out of the database between


of the task, we will not count them towards our maximum. I think this is a


price to pay given that if our performance monitor interval were long


say 30sec, the same thing could happen. We can also schedule the second code


run every business day at the same time so that the intervals between

reports is


Next time I will tackle gathering the size of

every database on the system dynamically.

Steve Jones

© September 2000

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