I work with legacy systems that have tens of thousand of lines of stored procedure code, where many of the stored procedures are obsolete and not used anymore. There doesn’t seem to be a way to check execution history, so my question is if it might be a good idea to start each stored procedure by inserting a row into a table that keeps records of the execution?
could be very simple like:
insert into executionHistory ( name, date ) select ‘spName’, getdate()
— then rest of procedure
I imagine this could be very useful for doing cleanups of old unused code, and might also be handy when trying to decide where to optimize. I mean it’s better to shave 10 seconds off execution time on a procedure that is executed 50 times a day, than saving 10 minutes execution time on a procedure that is only used once a year.
I think your idea is simple enough and would accomplish your goal. Though it would involve modifying every SP, it’s the route I would choose. Then you can ensure that you’re getting an accurate recording of all activity on the database.
Another poster suggested you do a trace – while this works for short periods, it’s only going to catch the time you’re watching. You’d have to make sure you traces across any important, high-traffic periods, like month-end financial closing, and even then, you’re missing other times you don’t think are that big a deal, so you’re being subjective.