Question

I don’t know much about SQL Profiler and just purchased Brad McGehee’s book, Master SQL Server Profiler to learn more. In the book, he says, a couple times, how bad the user experience is, and that it could be more feature rich.

For those of you with Profiler experience, what would you like to see changed or improved?

Thanks very much

Answer 1

The #1 problem with SQL Profiler is that doing simple things is hard. Say you’d like to trace a single user:

1. Open SQL Profiler
2. Click “New Trace” from the menu (What’s a new trace? I just want to monitor a user.)
3. Go to the “event selection tab” (tab 1 contains only options I’ve never used in over 10 years)
4. Click on the “Column Filters” button (this doesn’t filter on columns, but on event properties)
5. Select LoginName (or, depending on the login mode, NTLoginName)
6. Click “Like”
7. Enter the username (there’s no check if your user exists, so don’t typo)
8. Check “Exclude rows that do not contain values”
9. Click the OK button
10. Click the Run button (despite the Run, a traces just watches)

Pretty much all of these steps are anti-intuitive.

A better GUI would make easy stuff easy. Come up with a dialog that allows you to select database(s), select user(s), and click GO. That would cover 90% of use cases in 2 steps. A 500% improvement!