SQL Server Profiler

SQL Server Profiler is a graphical tool that allows system administrators to monitor engine events, such as:

• Login connects, fails, and disconnects
• Transact-SQL SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE statements
• Remote procedure call (RPC) batch status
• Start or end of a stored procedure
• Start or end of statements within stored procedures
• Start or end of an SQL batch
• Lock acquired or released on a database object
• An opened cursor
• Missing statistics that force the query optimizer to guess a predicate’s selectivity

Data about each event can be captured and saved to a file or a SQL Server table for later analysis. Event data can be filtered so that only a relevant subset is collected. For example, only the events that affect a specific database, or those for a particular user, are collected; all others are ignored. Alternatively, data could be collected about only those queries that take longer than 30 seconds to execute.

SQL Server Profiler allows captured event data to be replayed against SQL Server, thereby effectively reexecuting the saved events as they originally occurred. You can troubleshoot problems in SQL Server by capturing all the events that lead up to a problem, and then, by replaying the events on a test system, replicate and isolate the problem.