We have this PasteThePlan where you can copy/paste the contents of execution plans, and then share the links around the web. You’ve pasted 16,621 plans so far, and I’m always amused to see them continuing to trickle in every day without us actively promoting that tool. It just works, doing its thing quietly.

Back in 2017, we added Disqus comments at the bottom of each plan – mostly because it was easy to do, and I thought it might make your work easier if you could carry on a discussion with folks while you were working on it together.

I was wrong. Allowing comments was a bad idea.

We only got one kind of comment: “fix this query for me, kthxbai”

After leaving dozens of responses pointing people to my post on Getting Help With a Slow Query, I finally gave up and had Richie put this at the bottom of the query window instead:

The “get help” link points to my post on getting help with a slow query, and the report link sends us an email. (Sometimes folks upload query plans with things that probably shouldn’t be shown in public, so we wanna redact those if folks come across it.)

I feel bad because this is a symptom of something larger: people need free (or maybe affordable) help with query tuning.

We’ve kicked around the idea of building advice into PasteThePlan, showing the same kinds of warnings that we show in sp_BlitzCache, but it would cost Richie’s time (read: my money) to build that feature, and I don’t see revenue there to justify the development time. We do invest in it: Richie just updated it last week to add SQL Server 2019 plan support and fix a bunch of tests.

If you, dear reader, want a project idea and you think there’s revenue there to sustain it (or you’re willing to do it for free), then here you go: build something that will let people get advice on their queries. Maybe it’s an SSMS or Azure Data Studio plugin, maybe you run the code client-side, or maybe they upload the plan to the cloud and you do the calculations there.

If you launch it, let me know – I’d love to see it & share it.