It is one of the most interesting topic in SQL Server “How to Replay profiler”. But, I have not seen this feature is used efficiently by many. Today, we are going to see how can we use Replay profiler in SQL Server.

Usages:

1. Can be used to reproduce issues in one environment to another environment(production environment to lower environments)
2. Can be used to run the trace multiple times as part of investigation

Now, Let us quickly see how can we use the Replay option in SQL Server.

1. Collect the Profiler trace with Replay option.

This is a very important step to collect what needs to replay. SQL Profiler provides a default template to choose the Replay option. We need to select the template and run the profiler on the source server/database while we execute the functionality that needs to be applied to target database/server.

2. Save the collected trace to a Table

3. Once saved the Replay trace, you can connect to target server and open the trace collected

File -> Open -> Trace Table -> Connect the server that trace saved

4. Once the trace is opened in the Profiler window, we can run the Replay Trace

Replay -> Start -> Select “Target Server”
You can select Replay Configuration in the window as below:(Not covering all the option here, please explore and configure as required)

I (my personal choice) usually include “Display Execution Time”, but its optional.

Once the configurations are set, we can “Start” the Replay.

If you see the above sample snapshot, we can see that the trace has been run successfully. However, we see errors in the screenshot as when I tried to run the trace in the same server and database.

How do we run this trace in different server and different database?

Its always a case that we cannot expect the database name will be same in all environment. For an example, developer would have kept multiple version of same database like database_dev, database_unittest etc to test various purposes. If we try to run the trace as it is, we will end up with errors. To run on different environment, you need to make few changes as below:

1. Go to Management Studio (SSMS) and select the database where the trace table collected
2. Update the database Name and database id columns of the table to your target database name and database id

That means, the trace data needs to be changed for its database id and database name as per the target environment.Once the trace table data has been modified, we can follow the same procedure mentioned above(3 and 4).