sql_text returns *password—–

Problem

While hunting for performance bottlenecks using Spotlight some months ago I came across some strange statements listed only as *password—– (the – continues for a couple of pages). This was new to me, and even a search on the pesky trackers-with-integrated-search came up blank. We passed it off to the developers and never heard back, and I forgot about the whole thing. Then, during a stress test in QA it popped up on the radar again, and this time I decided to dig into it myself.

Analysis

Being a good boy, I was using extended events to trace down the problem. I do not know why, but profiler still feels more at home. Anyhow, I set up a session triggering on sql_text like “%*password—%. Looking something like this:

CREATE EVENT SESSION [pwdstar] ON SERVER
ADD EVENT sqlserver.rpc_starting( ACTION(sqlserver.client_app_name,sqlserver.client_connection_id,sqlserver.client_hostname,sqlserver.client_pid,sqlserver.database_name,sqlserver.session_id,sqlserver.sql_text,sqlserver.tsql_stack,sqlserver.username)
WHERE ([package0].[greater_than_uint64]([sqlserver].[database_id],(4)) AND [package0].[equal_boolean]([sqlserver].[is_system],(0)) AND ([sqlserver].[like_i_sql_unicode_string]([sqlserver].[sql_text],N'%*password--%') AND [sqlserver].[equal_i_sql_unicode_string]([sqlserver].[database_name],N'DBNAME'))))
ADD TARGET package0.event_file(SET filename=N'pwdstar',max_file_size=(200))
WITH (MAX_MEMORY=4096 KB,EVENT_RETENTION_MODE=ALLOW_SINGLE_EVENT_LOSS,MAX_DISPATCH_LATENCY=30 SECONDS,MAX_EVENT_SIZE=0 KB,MEMORY_PARTITION_MODE=NONE,TRACK_CAUSALITY=ON,STARTUP_STATE=OFF
GO

I came back an hour later to look at the results, and was surprised to find that the tsql_stack returned a more normal looking statement:

image

Back to the trackers I went, this time trying to figure out why sql_text differed from statement. This produced far better results, and I came across this article: https://www.sqlskills.com/blogs/jonathan/understanding-the-sql_text-action-in-extended-events/, and following the links produced the following statement from Mr. Keheyias:

· If the sql_text Action returns:



*password------------------------------


the text was stripped by the engine because it contained a password reference in it.  This functionality occurs in SQL Trace as well and is a security measure to prevent passwords from being returned in the trace results.

As I said, this was news to me, but the function seems to be an old one not necessarily related to xEvents. Extended Events does however use a more aggressive masking algorithm than what is used in profiler from what I can tell.

Solution

If you come across such queries in your profiler or xEvents results, you are dealing with something SQL server believes is password related. The results are thus hidden. The easiest way to get the statement is capturing tsql_stack as well. In SQL 2016 you can capture the statement directly:

image

Author: DizzyBadger

SQL Server DBA, Cluster expert, Principal Analyst

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