Sql-server – What query specific counters / metric if any are exposed for monitoring outside of SQL Server itself

Typically the features that you don't hear about from marketing are the ones that don't bring in all the money (e.g. pushed as "enterprise feaures" in order to sell Enterprise Edition). I answered a similar question here that provided a list of my favorite new features in 2012, that also aren't limited to Enterprise Edition:

What are Objective Business Reasons to Prefer SQL Server 2012 over 2008 R2?

(I could list them here but I don't think duplication makes sense. And there are some other good answers on that page as well.)

The only difference would be you could add to the list the things that have been added from 2008 on: date/time data types, data compression (Enterprise), backup compression (Standard+), some syntax improvements (multi-row values, inline declare + assign, +=/-=, etc). These are things you would get, though, whether you went 2005 -> 2008 R2 or 2005 -> 2012. Guess I knee-jerked listing those because you won't get them if you stay where you are.

In addition, moving to 2012 now instead of 2008 R2 buys you a longer lease toward end-of-life / end-of-mainstream support. However if you are using CAL licensing you might consider 2008 R2, because this option isn't available anymore in 2012 Enterprise. And core licensing can be more expensive if your CPUs have more than 4 cores per socket. They recently updated the "How to Buy" part of the site; you should stay on top of that and keep in good touch with a licensing rep. They're not perfect (and we can have a different discussion about this) but they're the only ones who can give you plausible deniability should anything they sell you end up putting you out of compliance, as long as you haven't lied to them. :-)

If you're going to take advantage of CPU-intensive things like compression, then having faster, fewer cores may be tolerable overall especially since it will make your SQL licensing (quite likely the most expensive part of your solution) that much cheaper. More, slower cores will be more expensive in terms of licensing, and spreading the work over more cores won't necessarily do any better for an OLTP-type workload - since many tasks cannot be parallel anyway. Also, AMD cores are subject to a core factor, which means the pricing is adjusted. This means you pay less per AMD core than per Intel core, but this is probably reflected in the performance, as well (at least if my conversations with Glenn Berry are any indication). No discount like this is in effect for 2008 R2 (at least AFAIK) since you're paying by the socket. Personally, I would rather spend the money on the better cores, but at 48x + 1.33x for licensing I'm not sure I could sell the bean-counters on it. :-)

But there's no way anyone here can tell you which way to go. If you can get some spec hardware in both configurations that would be ideal - you really should test your full workload cycle to see if fewer, faster processors are better for your workload - or at least close enough that they are justified by the licensing savings. On modern hardware I'd expect that to be a better option but I am not going to sign anything that guarantees it. :-)

Kevin's answer describes what events to capture in SQL Trace/SQL Profiler. To expand on that answer a bit - SP:StmtCompleted will show you each statement within a stored procedure being completed, as it sounds.

Also if you are on a busy system and trying to diagnose a performance issue you should be careful with SQL Profiler. SQL Profiler is much slower than tracing to a file or using Extended Events. This blog post by Jonathan Kehayias shows about a 90% overhead on a system's performance from using SQL Profiler and about a 10% overhead from tracing to file. Less for Extended Events. That is why it is typically recommended to not run SQL Profiler itself whil

While this information is available through Extended Events, I would suggest still using SQL Trace (the technology behind SQL Profiler) but tracing to a file instead (if you wanted to invest in learning and using Extended Events this would be the way to go, in a future version of SQL Server SQL Trace will be gone and all we'll have is Extended Events) . I would also suggest you filter through the Column Filters button out as much background noise as possible to make sure you are only capturing what is necessary. You can setup your trace with the Profiler tool using the steps Kevin describes in his good answer and then add a filter from that same GUI. Then you can export the trace as a script and run that script on SQL Server tracing to a file on a folder that doesn't contain database or transaction log files. To export, you would simply setup your trace, run it for a few seconds to just make sure you are capturing what you want, stop it and then go to the menu bar and File -> Export -> Script Trace Definition and save the file. Then open that file in a new query window on the server you intend to trace. You can see more about the options and definitions of this script you created by looking at the help articles for the various stored procedures used in that script you just created by starting here.

If you have time and want to learn, you can also read some articles on Extended Events and see how to capture the information as well. Jonathan Kehayias is a great resource for blog posts when you are ready to start there.