How can I see the SQL statements executed against my localdb database?

Question

I'm running LocalDB to develop my application and would like to see the SQL statements which are being executed by my application from its various components. Is there a tool I can use to capture these statements?

Answer 1

Let me chime in on two very light-weight Sql profilers that can do the job for various SqlServer flavors, including LocalDb - "worked on my machine (TM)"

ExpressProfiler

By far the easiest to use one (and also the most bare-bones-show-me-the-SQL-statements-kthxbye) is ExpressProfiler on CodePlex.

And the whole program is a single 126 KB EXE ! Now that's lightweight!

AnjLab Sql Profiler

The other one is the one from DataWizard, which used to be free (apparently prices now start at $5).

Somebody managed to save a snapshot on GitHub (including xcopy-installable binaries) when it was open-source.

The executable presents itself as "AnjLab Sql Profiler" and allows some filtering of the displayed events - but this strength is also its weakness, as there are sooo many event types that can be enabled/disabled. If everything is selected, the output is overwhelmingly verbose.

A saner output can be obtained by only selecting specific events.

Here are the events I have selected in order to get the above output: