Live monitoring SQL statements on SQL Server

Question

How can I monitor running SQL Statements for my SQL Server, is it possible using only SQL Server without 3rd party tools?

As an alternative can anybody recommend any free tool which can monitor running statements over ODBC connections?

Answer 1

There's Sql Server Profiler which comes with the installation. It allows you to monitor all SQL statements with various filter criteria. You could also pair it up with PerfMon to investigate performance.

MSDN Sql Server Profiler

I also found this site Receiving Profiler Events. Which allows real-time tracking in .NET.

Answer 2

If you use SQL Profiler, you can monitor all the goings on in the SQL DB.

Answer 3

I would prefer Adam Machanic's sp_WhoIsActive for that.

You can create a job that executes the SP say every 5 minutes and insert the results to a table. Than examine that table for reporting.

Brent Ozar has a blog post for a similar purpose. He uses it to mitigate a problem.