It was 3am in the morning and I was asleep and enjoying a delightful dream (I knew it was a dream because I was surrounded by drifting clouds, singing angels and hundreds of softly humming SQL Servers where the hardware had been sensibly provisioned and all code carefully optimised) when I was rudely awoken by a Service Desk call informing me that the systems were unresponsive. A quick check and I could see that everything was being blocked a particular transaction. My suspicion was that someone had run a script which had opened a transaction and then toddled off home without checking that either the script had finished or closed the transaction that it had opened.
My guess was right and killing the transaction got the cogs turning again.
For a little lunchtime quickie today I thought I’d share with you all a little script that I wrote to give me details on all open transactions that I’ve got on an instance. It made my life easier at 3am to see what mischief our culprit had been upto and hopefully you’ll find it useful too.
The below code can also be found in our GitHub repository
/****************************************************************** Author: David Fowler Revision date: 07/02/2018 Version: 1 Description: Display details on all open transaction on the instance © www.sqlundercover.com MIT License Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE. ******************************************************************/ SELECT SessionTrans.session_id ,ActiveTrans.transaction_begin_time ,DATEDIFF(SECOND,ActiveTrans.transaction_begin_time,GETDATE()) AS Duration_Seconds ,CASE ActiveTrans.transaction_state WHEN 0 THEN 'Uninitialised' WHEN 1 THEN 'Not Started' WHEN 2 THEN 'Active' WHEN 3 THEN 'Ended' WHEN 4 THEN 'Commit Initiated' WHEN 5 THEN 'Prepared' WHEN 6 THEN 'Commited' WHEN 7 THEN 'Rolling Back' WHEN 8 THEN 'Rolled Back' ELSE CAST(ActiveTrans.transaction_state AS VARCHAR) END AS TransactionState ,sessions.login_name ,sessions.host_name ,sessions.program_name ,DB_NAME(sessions.database_id) AS DBName ,SQLText.text AS LastCommand FROM sys.dm_tran_session_transactions SessionTrans JOIN sys.dm_tran_active_transactions ActiveTrans ON SessionTrans.transaction_id = ActiveTrans.transaction_id JOIN sys.dm_exec_sessions Sessions ON Sessions.session_id = SessionTrans.session_id JOIN sys.dm_exec_connections connections ON Connections.session_id = Sessions.session_id CROSS APPLY sys.dm_exec_sql_text(Connections.most_recent_sql_handle) SQLText
SQL Undercover 
There are some small typos when running your code on a case-sensitive instance. The table alias “connections” should be “Connections”. And the aliasses “sessions” in the SELECT part should also start with a capital “S”.
For me the [Sessions].[status] column also gives some valuable information, so I would include that in the SELECT script. It shows you if connections are currently executing stuff on the instance, or are just waiting for the application to give the next command.
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Thanks for the comment. A couple of people have now mentioned issues with case sensitive collations so it’s something that I’ll keep in mind for future scripts 🙂
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What is the minimum version of SQL for this? I get
Msg 207, Level 16, State 1, Line 1
Invalid column name ‘database_id’.
TIA,
SQLOzzie
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It looks like database_id wasn’t added into sys.dm_exec_sessions until 2012, so as the script stands you’ll need at least SQL 2012. However a quick change to the script to swap sys.dm_exec_sessions for sys.sysprocesses will make it compatible with at least SQL2008 and possibly 2005 (I’ve only tested it on a 2008 instance, the DMVs are all there in 2005 but I can’t promise that there wont be columns missing and I haven’t got a 2005 instance handy to check). If you’re using 2005, I’d love to know if it works, let me know 🙂
2008 compatible script is below…
SELECT SessionTrans.session_id
,ActiveTrans.transaction_begin_time
,DATEDIFF(SECOND,ActiveTrans.transaction_begin_time,GETDATE()) AS Duration_Seconds
,CASE ActiveTrans.transaction_state
WHEN 0 THEN ‘Uninitialised’
WHEN 1 THEN ‘Not Started’
WHEN 2 THEN ‘Active’
WHEN 3 THEN ‘Ended’
WHEN 4 THEN ‘Commit Initiated’
WHEN 5 THEN ‘Prepared’
WHEN 6 THEN ‘Commited’
WHEN 7 THEN ‘Rolling Back’
WHEN 8 THEN ‘Rolled Back’
ELSE CAST(ActiveTrans.transaction_state AS VARCHAR)
END AS TransactionState
,sessions.loginame
,sessions.hostname
,sessions.program_name
,DB_NAME(sessions.dbid) AS DBName
,SQLText.text AS LastCommand
FROM sys.dm_tran_session_transactions SessionTrans
JOIN sys.dm_tran_active_transactions ActiveTrans ON SessionTrans.transaction_id = ActiveTrans.transaction_id
JOIN sys.sysprocesses Sessions ON Sessions.spid = SessionTrans.session_id
JOIN sys.dm_exec_connections connections ON Connections.session_id = Sessions.spid
CROSS APPLY sys.dm_exec_sql_text(Connections.most_recent_sql_handle) SQLText
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David – thanks for the quick reply. Awesome code – found someone with a 5 day lock.
Just an FYI – when I forwarded the email/link to work – I received this warning:
The response was:
554 rejected due to spam URL in content
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