Microsoft® SQL Server 2012 Unleashed

Importing a Trace File into a Trace Table

Although you can load a trace file directly into Profiler for analysis, very large files can be difficult to analyze. Profiler loads an entire file. For large files, this process can take quite awhile, and the responsiveness of Profiler might not be the best. Multiple trace output files for a given trace can also be cumbersome and difficult to manage when those files are large.

You can use the trace filters to limit which rows are displayed but not which rows are imported into Profiler. You often end up with a bunch of rows displayed with no data in the columns you want to analyze. In addition, while the filters allow you to limit which rows are displayed, they don’t really provide a means of running ...