Can you get data in report form from the PlayBack database?
It’s not possible to get a report showing recent data from a table since that data is stored in the Playback database. You can only get stored data once the application pushes the data from the PlayBack to the Spotlight Statistics Repository.
Spotlight on SQL Server has two databases; the playback database for short term history used by the client and the Spotlight Statistics Repository for long term history used for reporting and trending. The PlayBack data is compressed and is not intended to be accessed directly by customers.
The Spotlight Statistics Repository is accessible by customers and is described in the help under Spotlight\Spotlight Reporting and Trending\Spotlight Statistics Repository.
The IO statistics used by the stored procedure spotlight_rt_get_fileio_stats are collected by the Virtual File Statistics collection which by default is collected every 6 hours. This same data could be accessed by a used defined stored procedure given that spotlight_rt_get_fileio_stats only reports on the end points of the date range. There is a certain amount of complexity in producing such a report to show data for each collection because some of the values are differences between successive data points i.e. some data comes from SQL Server counters.
Also altering the collection interval for the Virtual File Statistics collection will put extra load on the monitored instances, especially if there are a large number of files.
