March Madness – SQL Azure – sys.dm_exec_connections

Yesterday we talked about how you can view the currently connected sessions to your SQL Azure instance. Doing so allowed for us to view the background sessions that were currently running tasks against our instance. Today we will look at the current connections and the sys.dm_exec_connections system view.

You can see all the current connections to your SQL Azure instance by running the following:

SELECT *
FROM sys.dm_exec_connections

By joining to the sys.dm_exec_sessions system view we can use the following query to more effectively monitor who is connected to our SQL Azure instance:

SELECT es.program_name, es.host_name,
es.login_name, COUNT(ec.session_id) AS [connection_count]
FROM sys.dm_exec_sessions AS es
INNER JOIN sys.dm_exec_connections AS ec ON es.session_id = ec.session_id
GROUP BY es.program_name, es.host_name, es.login_name

With that query you can poll your SQL Azure instance to track your connections at regular intervals. Tomorrow we will take a look at yet another SQL Azure system view that helps us see what activity is hitting our instance.