Not alone with SQL Server you would be able to identify the root cause of a performance issue or to monitor any kind of activity. As you may be aware SYSMON (PERFMON) and PROFILER will help to some extent of finding offending processes on the SQL Server for further fine tuning for queries or tasks. Still...

Here is the kind of scripts defined within TEchnet articles about running black-box kind of traces against your SQL Server instance, then also you can take advantage of the blackbox trace if you are facing intermittent problems, you want to make sure that it is always running when your server is running...

Log or trace of activities will help you to get detailed information on what's going wrong, that too very useful for ETL based processes. In this regard within SQL Server 2005 using SSIS you can enable such logging within the package's runtime. This will allow you to log the output to 5 providers...

Performance - one word does it all! You are aware that during the Performance Tuning exercise there are few quick wins within the SQL Server Relational Database Engine such as table statistics for data and indexes. When it comes to Analysis Services (BI) database then no difference as one o f the greatest...

When SQL Server 2005 Management Studio's Object Browser shows the SQL Server Agent service with a red down arrow and the text Agent XP's disabled , the service is not started or disabled. This used to be a problem prior to Service Pack 2 for SQL Server 2005, obviously SQLAgent is important part...

use msdb declare @schedule_uid uniqueidentifier select @schedule_uid=(select schedule_uid from msdb..sysschedules where name=N'CollectorSchedule_Every_15min') declare @collection_set_id int; exec dbo.sp_syscollector_create_collection_set @name = N'SqlTraceDefault', @schedule_uid = @schedule_uid...

The following pages were recently modified. Source: Knowledge Base Product: Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition Notification Contents: New and Major Modifications How to use a stored procedure to monitor traces in SQL Server 2005 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/912914/en-US...( read more )