ZENworks® ESM 3.5 Administrator’s Manual 225
Microsoft SQL Profiler
SQL Profiler is a graphical tool that allows system administrators to monitor events in an instance
of Microsoft® SQL Server™. You can capture and save data about each event to a file or SQL
Server table to analyze later. For example, you can monitor a production environment to see
which stored procedures (a group of Transact-SQL statements compiled into a single execution
plan) are hampering performance by executing too slowly.
Use SQL Profiler to monitor only the events in which you are interested. If traces are becoming
too large, you can filter them based on the information you want, so that only a subset of the event
data is collected. Monitoring too many events adds overhead to the server and the monitoring
process and can cause the trace file or trace table to grow very large, especially when the
monitoring process takes place over a long period of time.
After you have traced events, SQL Profiler allows captured event data to be replayed against an
instance of SQL Server, thereby effectively re-executing the saved events as they occurred
originally.
Use SQL Profiler to:
• Monitor the performance of an instance of SQL Server.
• Debug Transact-SQL statements and stored procedures.
• Identify slow-executing queries.
• Test SQL statements and stored procedures in the development phase of a project by
single-stepping through statements to confirm that the code works as expected.
• Troubleshoot problems in SQL Server by capturing events on a production system and
replaying them on a test system. This is useful for testing or debugging purposes and
allows users to continue using the production system without interference.
• Audit and review activity that occurred on an instance of SQL Server. This allows a
security administrator to review any of the auditing events, including the success and
failure of a login attempt and the success and failure of permissions in accessing state-
ments and objects.
SQL Profiler provides a graphical user interface to a set of stored procedures that can be used to
monitor an instance of SQL Server. For example, it is possible to create your own application that
uses SQL Profiler stored procedures to monitor SQL Server.
You must have at least 10 megabytes (MB) of free space to run SQL Profiler. If free space drops
below 10 MB while you are using SQL Profiler, all SQL Profiler functions will stop.
SQL Profiler Terminology
To use SQL Profiler, you need to understand the terminology that describes the way the tool
functions. For example, you create a template that defines the data you want to collect. You
collect this data by running a trace on the events defined in the template. While the trace is
