Configure the application name in the connection string of your applications

Recently, I was working with a customer who faced an interesting challenge. They had multiple queries running on their SQL Server from a single machine, and some of those queries were causing issues. The tricky part? This machine was running several applications simultaneously, and while we could capture the client application name in traces (using both Extended Events and even the now-deprecated Profiler), it didn’t give us enough detail to pinpoint which specific application was causing the trouble.

But there’s a very simple fix for this!

By configuring the application name in the connection string, we can make tracing much more effective. Let’s take a standard connection string like this:

Server=myServerAddress;Database=myDataBase;User id=myUsername;Password=myPassword;        

?Now, if we modify it to include the application name, it becomes:

Server=myServerAddress;Database=myDataBase;User Id=myUsername;Password=myPassword;Application Name=MyApplication;        

With this change, you can now easily identify which application is responsible for certain queries in your traces. This small adjustment can help you get to the root of query-related issues much faster. When dealing with deadlocks or blocked processes, having the ‘Application Name’ in your trace data makes your investigation far more straightforward.

So, next time you're deploying applications, make sure the application name is added to your connection string. You’ll find it can make a complex puzzle much simpler to solve.

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