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Free SQL Profiler

I'm using a SQL database from my workstation, which only has the Management Studio installed but the the profiling tools (which don't come with the stand-alone management studio install).

I need to run a trace on the server, but I don't have full access and I don't want to go through the full SQL installer just to get the profiling tools, even if I were to figure out how to do that.

I stumbled across this open-source profiler for SQL Server 2005/2008 Express which looks like it might do the trick:

http://sites.google.com/site/sqlprofiler/

Looks like it does the trick.  I had to run as a user with administrative privileges (access to sys.traces is key), so your mileage may vary.

It's not a very sophisticated tool.  For example, I didn't see a way to save the results of my trace.  That's a big annoyance.

The filtering and event system is fairly straightforward.  I had to identify the database in which I was interested, as well as the events that looked like they might have anything to do with the queries which I was hunting...commits, sql statements, stored procedures and batches looked like they might be events I was interested in.  In the end, this gave me a lot more information than I wanted, which I then had to comb through in the program's UI.  If I had a better idea as to what the events meant, I could probably cut down the volume of info.  Dumping to CSV would allow me to use my favorite data dicing tool, Excel.

But, all in all, I was able to get the information I was looking for, so I appreciate a free tool.  Perhaps it can do you some good as well.