A highly requested feature has come to life: now you can save your workload to a file and replay it later to a target SQL Server instance.
The file format is not the same as in traces or extended events, but it is... a database instead. I decided to use SQLite as the intermediate format for WorkloadTools. The reason is that traces can only be written and read from a 32 bit process (sic) because the DLLs are 32 bit only. XEL files are not available in older versions, so I had to choose a different format.
In order to record to a file, you need to use the WorkloadFileWriterConsumer, as in this example:
{
"Controller": {
"Listener":
{
"__type": "ExtendedEventsWorkloadListener",
"ConnectionInfo":
{
"ServerName": "(local)\\SQL2014"
},
"DatabaseFilter": "AdventureWorks"
},
"Consumers":
[
{
"__type": "WorkloadFileWriterConsumer",
"OutputFile": "c:\\temp\\workload.sqlite"
}
]
}
}
Then you can use the workload you captured with a FileWorkloadListener:
{
"Controller": {
"Listener":
{
"__type": "FileWorkloadListener",
"Source": "c:\\temp\\workload.sqlite",
"SynchronizationMode": "true"
},
"Consumers":
[
{
"__type": "ReplayConsumer",
"ConnectionInfo":
{
"ServerName": "(local)\\SQL2016",
"DatabaseName": "AdventureWorks"
}
}
]
}
}
In case you're wondering, yes, I know that you want to work with your existing trace and xel files. I'm working on a tool to convert your files in the sqlite format and I'll add it to WorkloadTools shortly