SSMS Log file viewer and Deadlock Graphs

Firstly I must say a big thank you to Microsoft for the new deadlock trace flag 1222. Compared to the trace flag output for 1204 & 1205 that you had to use in SQL 2000 it’s a walk in the park to interpret.

Anyway, back to the post at hand! This is a quick FYI as i`m not going to go through how to interpret a deadlock graph because Bart Duncan does a fantastic job of it here.

When you enable 1222, it will output the deadlock information to the error log. If your using the log file viewer and steam on in and do your analysis you will probably find you get your deadlock victim the wrong way round like I did in the first cut of my analysis. Fortunately I did realise my mistake which made me look at the output again and I realised that the output in the log is upside down! This is because the log file viewer sorts the log so that the most recent entry is first and as such reverses the deadlock output. I`m not aware of any way to configure the sort order of the log file viewer and exporting the log exports it in the same order its displayed….

So, when looking at your deadlock information you have 2 options.

• Find the occurrence of the words “deadlock – list” and read upwards.
• Grab a copy of the error log from the servers log directory and open it in notepad.