Differences in documentation for sys.dm_exec_requests
I've already complained about this on Connect (see #641790), but I just wanted to point out that if you're trying to make sense of the sys.dm_exec_requests document and what it lists as the commands supported by the percent_complete column, you should check which version of the documentation you're reading. I noticed the following discrepancies. I can't explain why certain operations are missing, except that the Denali topic was generated from the 2008 topic (or maybe from the 2008 R2 topic before it was updated). The main problem here is that it is not clear which document to trust… if you're creating an index, for example, and it has been running for 20 minutes but shows 0 percent complete, is it really 0 percent complete? I don't think the answer is different whether you are running SQL Server 2008 or SQL Server 2008 R2, and the documentation should be accurately reflecting that.
SQL Server 2008 | SQL Server 2008 R2 | SQL Server Denali |
---|---|---|
ALTER INDEX REORGANIZE | ALTER INDEX REORGANIZE | ALTER INDEX REORGANIZE |
AUTO_SHRINK option with ALTER DATABASE | AUTO_SHRINK option with ALTER DATABASE | AUTO_SHRINK option with ALTER DATABASE |
BACKUP DATABASE | BACKUP DATABASE | BACKUP DATABASE |
CREATE INDEX | NO CREATE INDEX HERE | CREATE INDEX |
DBCC CHECKDB | DBCC CHECKDB | DBCC CHECKDB |
DBCC CHECKFILEGROUP | DBCC CHECKFILEGROUP | DBCC CHECKFILEGROUP |
DBCC CHECKTABLE | DBCC CHECKTABLE | DBCC CHECKTABLE |
DBCC INDEXDEFRAG | DBCC INDEXDEFRAG | DBCC INDEXDEFRAG |
DBCC SHRINKDATABASE | DBCC SHRINKDATABASE | DBCC SHRINKDATABASE |
DBCC SHRINKFILE | DBCC SHRINKFILE | DBCC SHRINKFILE |
KILL (Transact-SQL) | NO KILL HERE | KILL (Transact-SQL) |
NO RECOVERY HERE | RECOVERY | NO RECOVERY HERE |
RESTORE DATABASE | RESTORE DATABASE | RESTORE DATABASE |
NO ROLLBACK HERE | ROLLBACK | NO ROLLBACK HERE |
NO TDE ENCRYPTION HERE | TDE ENCRYPTION | NO TDE ENCRYPTION HERE |
UPDATE STATISTICS | NO UPDATE STATISTICS HERE | UPDATE STATISTICS |
The 2005 version of Books Online gets a free pass. I complained about this on Connect, and while they have certainly fixed the issue for 2008+, the 2005 docs still show no commands and have a weirdly formatted note box:
John, do you mean you are running UPDATE STATISTICS and percent_complete is never a positive value? How long does the command take, and what options are you using? Do you see different results on other versions of SQL Server?
On my 2008 installation (version 10.0.4064.0). The UPDATE STATISTICS does not work!
Don't you have time just to test all of those… on all of the versions? Common Aaron – where's your community spirit?! 😉
And, yes, definitely a bug in docs. Would be good to get the 411 on it though. It's got to be relatively easy to find in the code?!
Cheers,
kt