It's not usually that simple with profiler, as production queries can be highly contextual and aren't always 'replayable' unless they're interacting on the same data as the original. It can also be pretty high impact on a busy system.
Agent is nice because of the surrounding infrastructure -scheduling, notifications, etc - that said, it still often ends up being a hodgepodge that every admin reinvents, just using different underlying structures (cron=scheduling, system mail=notifications, etc).
And yeah, the HA stuff is good - with the setup becoming gradually easier with each new version, but those license costs are definitely reflecting that.
While SQL Server does have some great features - it's also missing a fair bit of functionality. I.e., there's no real 'overview' of how the system is performing. Look at SQLSentry for an idea of what I mean - I only manage one 'major' database, but without that tool I'd be hard pressed to keep up. There's also things that have been broken for years now which they've failed to address - i.e., one of the most popular add-ons for SQL Studio is SQL Prompt to get actual working intellisense. They can manage it for multiple extensible languages in visual studio, but flub it for years with the fairly static TSQL. I actually thought it must have been a fairly complex problem until I saw JetBrains implement it for multiple variations of SQL in DataGrip.
Agent is nice because of the surrounding infrastructure -scheduling, notifications, etc - that said, it still often ends up being a hodgepodge that every admin reinvents, just using different underlying structures (cron=scheduling, system mail=notifications, etc).
And yeah, the HA stuff is good - with the setup becoming gradually easier with each new version, but those license costs are definitely reflecting that.
While SQL Server does have some great features - it's also missing a fair bit of functionality. I.e., there's no real 'overview' of how the system is performing. Look at SQLSentry for an idea of what I mean - I only manage one 'major' database, but without that tool I'd be hard pressed to keep up. There's also things that have been broken for years now which they've failed to address - i.e., one of the most popular add-ons for SQL Studio is SQL Prompt to get actual working intellisense. They can manage it for multiple extensible languages in visual studio, but flub it for years with the fairly static TSQL. I actually thought it must have been a fairly complex problem until I saw JetBrains implement it for multiple variations of SQL in DataGrip.