DBA Utility Belt: What’s Happening?

There are some nice system stored procedures and DMVs which provide you information on what’s going on within SQL Server at any time.

This procedure returns active queries:

SELECT   
	st.text, 
	r.session_id, 
	r.status, 
	r.command, 
	r.cpu_time, 
	r.total_elapsed_time
FROM 
	sys.dm_exec_requests r
	CROSS APPLY sys.dm_exec_sql_text(sql_handle) AS st;

sp_who2 is a very quick source for what’s going on with regard to sessions:

exec sp_who2

To be honest, though, I really prefer Adam Machanic’s sp_WhoIsActive for all of this work. I would consider it the single best stored procedure publically available.