SQL Profiler EventClass & EventSubClass Column Descriptions

Written by Dan Hardan. Posted in SSAS Scripts

You can use SQL Profiler to store trace data into files or tables. If you configure SQL Profiler to store trace information into a SQL Server table, you will notice that the EventClass and EventSubClass descriptions are converted to numeric values instead of textual descriptions. This is because numeric values are language neutral, whereas SQL Server Profiler performs translations into the default locale of the current user.

The textual translations for the English are stored in "[Drive]:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.X\OLAP\bin\Resources\1033\tracedefinitionXX.xml" where Xs corresponds to the installed version of SQL Server.

If you're like me, you've needed EventClass and EventSubClass column translations when storing SQL Profiler Trace data into a table. The SQL Script below creates two tables: dbo.ProfilerEventClass and dbo.ProfilerEventSubClass. These tables are populated with the 1033 translations. Also included in this post are the original, though somewhat crude, XSLT files used to transform the tracedefinition90.xml into SQL statements.