Normally, my response is for the other party to...

OK. That's twice. It should stop now.

I'm so stupid...

This is 2005 right? Toss trace. Run a query against sys.dm_exec_query_stats. This is a dynamic management view that contains information about the queries currently in cache. You can...

Oops. There I am typing up the response and looking for your URL and there you are posting it. Ah well. Reinforces the point.

It really depends on how you're going to use the information. Since it's only a single row returned, probably, you won't have issues with either approach. Usually, the inline is...

Cross-posted here: http://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic586167-145-1.aspx

Please keep posts to one forum.

Yikes. That doesn't sound good.

First, don't use Profiler on the production server. Instead, set up a server side trace. Second, use Steve's advice and put a filter on the trace...

It's 10 levels in a CASE statement (here's the page in the local Books Online). I don't know of a limit on IF statements, but I think it's reasonably safe...

Any chance of tuning the procedure or adding indexes to help it out?

Since your server is stressed, you'll want to be judicious about using this, but I'd suggest placing a trace on the server to capture the queries that are being called....

Simplest way I can think of is to capture the trace output from your production box and the use the Profiler's ability to replay traces against the test machine. Capture...

Operations Manager is a completely seperate product sold by Microsoft. It's intention is for large scale enterprise level monitoring, reporting and alerting. Here's a place to learn a bit more...

Or, depending on how you're growing (by percent is the default and the worst choice), you can run out of space before it finishes growing.

Auto-growth is a nice safety valve,...

How about Selectivity AND Usage.

Gail sums up all the reasons better than I will. You need to take both into account when designing your indexes. Simple usage is not enough...

Excellent. Well done. I'll have to see if we can use this one on our servers.