How It Works: System Sessions

  • Article

The Senior Escalation Engineers do various training and mentoring activities. As I do this I thought I would try to propagate some of this information on the blog.

Looking at a SQL Server error log it is formatted with the date, time and session identifier.   Many of the identifiers contain the s following the spid value.

2008-01-08 20:03:36.12 spid5s

The s indicates that the session is a system session.   Prior to SQL Server 2005 all system sessions were limited to session ids less than 50.  SQL Server 2005 lifted that restriction.   In order identify a session performing system actives (lazy writer, ghost record cleanup, DTC commit/abort, ...) the sessions are identified as system sessions.

Instead of the older "select * from sysprocesses where spid < 50" you should use "select * from sys.dm_exec_sessions where is_user_process = 0" to identify system processes.

Bob Dorr
SQL Server Senior Escalation Engineer