Announcing the SSMS StatisticsParser Extension
If you do a lot of query tuning, you’ve probably come across Richie Rump’s StatisticsParser.com. Now, it’s even easier to use.
Now, it’s even easier to use. Download & install it, then run your query with SET STATISTICS IO, TIME ON, and after it finishes, right-click in the query window and click Parse Statistics:
You instantly get a new tab with the parsed results:
For its settings, go into Tools, Options, Statistics Parser:
To install it, download the latest release from Github, extract it into a folder. You can’t just double-click on the vsix extension file because Windows associates those with Visual Studio rather than SSMS. Open a PowerShell command prompt, and paste in:
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& "C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio 22\Release\Common7\IDE\VSIXInstaller.exe" StatisticsParser.vsix |
Similarly, if you need to uninstall it, SSMS v22 doesn’t have a Manage Extensions dialog yet, so you have to uninstall it via the command line too:
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& "C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio 22\Release\Common7\IDE\VSIXInstaller.exe" /uninstall:StatisticsParser.4A9EFF2E-819B-453D-BE4C-5DF7B343C0E7 |
If you like it and use it, drop Richie a comment or say hi to him on Bluesky. Enjoy!
Optional reading:
about the SSMS extensions situation
I had Richie build this to get a feel for what it’s like to build SSMS v22 extensions in the year 2026. The SSMS extension situation has historically been kinda sketchy, and while I would love to have a First Responder Kit extension, I didn’t wanna dedicate a lot of development resources until I knew it had a pretty high likelihood of success.
See, SSMS is built atop Visual Studio’s code base. At first that sounds great, because Visual Studio has an active official extensions marketplace with all kinds of cool tools, including some that purport to be for SSMS. There’s also an unofficial Open VSIX Gallery with a few SSMS v22 extensions by ErikEJ, aka Erik Ejlskov Jenson, the maintainer of SQLQueryStress.
However, Microsoft doesn’t officially support SSMS extensions yet. They don’t prohibit SSMS extensions or bar them from loading, they just don’t go out of their way to support or advertise them just yet.
To do it right, Microsoft would need an extension marketplace, a way to auto-update your extensions, and they would need to start testing new SSMS builds to make sure they don’t break common extensions. (This has been a pain point in the past: when new SSMS builds break a popular extension, Microsoft is in an awkward position because there’s a blame game between the public, the extension author, and Microsoft.)
I totally understand that those changes will take staffing and money. SSMS is a free product, and it’s hard for Microsoft to justify that kind of work for a free product’s extensions – it’s not like Microsoft makes money off the extensions either. I understand that, and I agree: I would rather that the Microsoft tooling team continue focusing on making the core product better. SSMS extension support is close enough that ambitious readers like you and I can find, install, and uninstall our own extensions without a marketplace.
In the short term, I would love to see a simple web site listing SSMS extensions with attributes like:
- The extension’s name and a short description
- A link to its home page
- Its price & licensing (open source, free, commercial, etc)
- The minimum & maximum SSMS versions supported
- Reviews from users
I thought about building something like that myself, but … there are just only so many hours in my own day, too, and I’d rather use that same time to start writing specs for Richie to build a First Responder Kit extension. If there’s something you’d like to see in that extension, drop a comment.
12 Comments. Leave new
Hi Brent.
There is a list of SSMS 22 extensions here: https://github.com/brink-daniel/ssms-object-explorer-menu/blob/main/SSMSExtensionList.md
Also, all the poweshell gymnastics are not required if the extension is built correctly (as in my extensions)
I will check Richie s code and help him.
Hi Brent.
There is a list of SSMS 22 extensions here: https://github.com/brink-daniel/ssms-object-explorer-menu/blob/main/SSMSExtensionList.md
Also, all the poweshell gymnastics are not required if the extension is built correctly (as in my extensions)
I will check Richie s code and help him.
Richie needs all of the help he can get. My guess is that I’m not targeting visual studio in the extension. VS extension development is crazy voodoo to me akin to T4 and VS templating.
Pretty great feature would be to display in both local time and UTC time for those of us unfortunate enough to have multiple time zones in our database
Putting in a CR to install this now
I started a “data scripting” extension – TSqlFlex – about 12 years ago which used a library that RedGate put out that was the core of SQL Source Control and other extensions. That library made writing extensions for SSMS a lot easier. When Microsoft switched the guts of SSMS over to the newer version of Visual Studio in around 2016, unfortunately they never updated it and I could never quite figure out how to get the extension hosted natively in SSMS. But now in the age of LLMs that would probably be easier AND the need for the extension itself is probably mostly eliminated.
For fun:
https://github.com/nycdotnet/TSqlFlex
I (and Copilot) are working on a SSMS extensions web site! Will keep you posted
I use Devart’s SQL Complete and Search extensions. Great extensions. Search is free. SQL Complete has free and commercial versions. Both have just been updated this week to support SSMS 2.6.
I’ve managed to land myself a job with no SQL Server whatsoever which is a welcome relief in many ways and bittersweet in others — I’ll bear this in mind for the future. Thanks for making it Richie!
Brent,
I have one WinForm tool that could easily be made into a SSMS plugin but I haven’t done it. It scans all of the Programmability and Query Store and parses all the code to extract every table and column and ties it to the source. You can search for any table and combination of columns and build an index with any columns and include included columns and create an index and see the performance metrics for each. It’s a piece of code that I wrote at Little Caesars in 2015 to test performance migrating embedded TSQL to stored procedures. Query Store didn’t exist in 2015 but I made that modification in 2018 when I was working the production line at Moog producing missiles.
The problem i have found with missing indexes is that you are only working with a single piece of TSQL code and you have no idea how that index might affect other pieces of code. I have found that when I need to suggest an index to a DBA, it was always good to produce a report of what code would be affected. This was very useful at Little Caesars as developers would add indexes at will and we had 40 indexes on our order’s table and I wanted to see what indexes I could drop and what would be affected.
What it doesn’t do is anything related to stats or looking at memory grants as I only learned about stats by watching a couple of your videos probably at least a couple years back or memory grants after Amy Able expressed a concern back in 2024. It does handle Delphi projects but does not work with C# ADO or Entity Framework projects.
I did express a desire to present last week to Ben Miller and Amy Able both who you know well. If you want to see that application released you might talk to them and talk them into letting me try to present.
I’m sorry you’re dealing with this, and I understand that presenting matters deeply to you.
That said, I’m not able to keep revisiting this topic with you. I’ve shared the best advice I can: if you want people to benefit from your work, the path you fully control is to publish it somewhere people can access it — a blog post, GitHub repo, documentation, screenshots, a demo video, or even a written walkthrough.
I can’t arrange speaking opportunities or interpreter support for conferences or user groups, and I’m not the right person to keep processing that frustration with.
Going forward, please don’t use my blog comments or email to repeat the same complaint about not being able to present. If you publish something useful, you’re welcome to share a link. If you choose to keep the code private unless you can present it, that’s your decision, and I’ll respect it — but I’m not going to negotiate around it. I am not the hostage negotiator for your code.
I wish you the best with the project.
Oh my freaky god! This is the best! Sooooo much easier than copy/pasting into a web browser. Massive thanks to everyone involved.