First Responder Kit Release: Precon Precogs

Last Updated 6 years ago

First Responder Kit, First Responder Kit Updates

This release comes to you from a hotel room in Chicago: The land of fiscal insolvency and one shooting per hour.

It’s pretty nice, otherwise.

This release is to get the pre-precon important stuff in. As much as I’d like to push all the recent contributions through, between travel, speaking, and uh… what do the rock and roll stars call it? Exhaustion? We just don’t have the bandwidth to test everything this time around. I promise they’ll make it into the next release, when I have sleep and dual monitors and brain cells again.

You can download the updated FirstResponderKit.zip here.

sp_Blitz Improvements

Nothing this time. It took me 30 minutes to verify this, because it’s so weird.

sp_BlitzCache Improvements

#1099 We try to make things easy for you. That’s why we make tools like Paste The Plan, and well, sp_BlitzCache. It’s also why we answer questions for free on dba.stackexchange.com, along with a whole bunch of other smart folks. To make sure you’re aware of this stuff, I added a line to the rolled up warnings on how to get more help with a plan you’re stuck on.
#1140 A DEBUG MODE UNLIKE NO OTHER! Okay, just like every other. This’ll print out dynamic SQL, and run selects on all the temp table used in the proc. As part of this process, I moved (nearly) all the SELECT INTO code to INSERT SELECT, complete with drop/create statements on the temp tables.
#1141 For the first time, I think ever, we’ve removed something. A while back when I was merging stuff from our old private GitHub repo to our new public GitHub repo, I thought these looked like a good idea. They never once fired, and on servers with weird plan cache stuff going on, they sometimes ran for quite a while. Out they go.
#1146 We asked, and we listened. The query plan column is now moved way closer to the left in the result set. Now you don’t have to scroll 17 screens over to get there.
#1159 Refined the implicit conversion analysis queries. They now work much better. V1 of everything stinks.
#1195 On the line where we give you percentages of plans created in different time spans, we now give you a count of plans in the cache.
#1143, #1166, #1167 All team up to add some new functionality to our scripts as a whole. These changes make it possible for us to add sp_BlitzCache output tables to sp_BlitzFirst analysis,

sp_BlitzFirst Improvements

#1106 Those dang time zones, man. Just all the time with the time zones. Zones. Time. Time. Zones. Who can keep track? WE CAN! here’s proof.
#1154 Brent did this for Brenty reasons. He cares deeply about the Delta Views. When they’re more than four hours apart, data can look more like Southwestern Views: cheap, unenthusiastic, sober, domestic.
#1175 Okay, so two things got removed. I don’t know what world this is anymore. You can no longer ask a question. No, no, now you can log messages. It has something to do with PowerBI, which means I need to take a nap.
#1177 We really do try to make things understandable by human beings. Like, normal human beings. Normal human beings don’t understand Ring Buffers, but CPU percentages are easy. Hey, look, we can’t all be Jonathan Kehayias. If we could, we could keep talking about Ring Buffers.
#1200 AGAIN WITH THE TIME ZONES! And again, we prevail like mighty warriors… Okay, so more like a bunch of middle aged doughballs with God awful posture. But still. If you close your eyes, anything is possible. Especially naps. God I want a nap.
#1144, #1169 These are part of the BlitzCache stuff that make the PowerBI stuff work.

sp_BlitzIndex Improvements

#1132 When you have a lot of partitions, sometimes things run dog slow. Sometimes you don’t know that. Sometimes you don’t care. If you have > 100 partitions in the database, we skip partition level details. If you want to get them, you need to use the @BringThePain parameter.
#1160 Remember those AG things? We do too. Especially when they make sp_BlitzIndex fail. We skip those databases that aren’t in a readable state.

sp_BlitzWho Improvements

Ain’t not nothin’. Next time around, we’re going to be pruning the default list of columns that it returns, and adding an @ExpertMode that returns all of them. If you have opinions, now’s the time to let us know.

sp_DatabaseRestore Improvements

#1135 @James-DBA-Anderson (seriously that’s his middle name) added a check for permission denied messages from directory listings. Hurrah.
Next time around, the Most Famous Mullet On The Internet® is going to have a whole bunch of cool new tricks added. I’m more excited about these than I am about the stint in rehab I’m going to need after this trip.

sp_BlitzBackups Improvements

Nothing this time.

sp_BlitzQueryStore Improvements

#1178 The result sorting was stupid. I don’t know why I picked Query Cost. Probably that darned exhaustion, again. Now we order by the last execution time. We do this especially because when you’re troubleshooting parameter sniffing issues, it helps to know which version of a query executed most recently.
#1182 We’re now way more 2017 compatible. A couple of the new and interesting metrics added to Query Store (tempdb used, log bytes used) are now fully supported in the metrics gathering. Before they were only mildly supported. Like used hosiery.

sp_AllNightLog and sp_AllNightLog_Setup Improvements

Ain’t not nothin’!

sp_foreachdb Improvements

Ain’t not nothin’!

For Support

When you have questions about how the tools work, talk with the community in the #FirstResponderKit Slack channel. If you need a free invite, hit SQLslack.com. Be patient – it’s staffed with volunteers who have day jobs, heh.
When you find a bug or want something changed, read the contributing.md file.

When you have a question about what the scripts found, first make sure you read the “More Details” URL for any warning you find. We put a lot of work into documentation, and we wouldn’t want someone to yell at you to go read the fine manual. After that, when you’ve still got questions about how something works in SQL Server, post a question at DBA.StackExchange.com and the community (that includes us!) will help. Include exact errors and any applicable screenshots, your SQL Server version number (including the build #), and the version of the tool you’re working with.