In a previous blog entry, I mentioned you could import a Windows Perfmon log into SQL Server Profiler. I received a note that someone was having a problem doing this, and when we looked over his situation, it turned out that he was using a Windows Perfmon binary log, a SQL Server 2008 trace file - and he was running the whole analysis in XP. I’m not sure if that’s the issue, since I’ve converted my last XP machine.

There is a fix, however. When you save the data in Perfmon, or at least before you bring the file over to XP for analysis, save it as a CSV file. The Perfmon tool should be able to open it if it’s a binary issue, and then you can save it as a CSV from there.