Updated First Responder Kit and Consultant Toolkit for March 2020

Last Updated 4 years ago

In the immortal words of “Orange” Julius Caesar as written by Shake’s peer, “Beware the bugs of March.” It took us 2,064 years, but we’ve finally fixed those bugs, plus added a couple of new features.

To get the new version:

Download the updated FirstResponderKit.zip
Azure Data Studio users with the First Responder Kit extension:
ctrl/command+shift+p, First Responder Kit: Import.
Download the updated Consultant Toolkit in your account
EU customers: check your email for the updated version from Gumroad, our European distributor

Consultant Toolkit Changes

Updated the First Responder Kit with this month’s script updates.

sp_AllNightLog Changes

Fix: skip databases where ignore_database <> 0 in the backup_worker table. (#2308, thanks Maxiwheat.)

sp_Blitz Changes

Fix: don’t error out when some databases have numeric roundabort turned on, and a rounding error would normally throw an error. (#2302, thanks DJH.)
Fix: bug in full backup check: if msdb.backupset contained backups taken on other servers, we would have included them as successful backups when they really weren’t. (#2313, thanks Solomon Rutzky.)
Fix: uninstall script now works on case-sensitive collations. (#2307, thanks Protiguous.)

sp_BlitzCache Changes

Improvement: added a new check for the UserStore_TokenPerm cache being >10% of the buffer pool. I’m seeing issues out in the wild where this cache has taken over memory and caused SQL Server to be unable to cache any execution plans. This was an issue over a decade ago with SQL 2005, but I’ve got a SQL Server 2016/2017 client with an open case with Microsoft on it. We’ll be adding this same check for sp_Blitz and sp_BlitzFirst. (#2134, thanks Erik Darling.)

sp_BlitzFirst Changes

Fix: @FilterPlansByDatabase was throwing an error if you passed in a list of databases (rather than just “user” for the user databases.) (#2311, thanks Sam Carey.)

sp_BlitzLock Changes

Improvement: now catches single-query parallelism deadlocks, too. (#2286, thanks Adrian Buckman.)
Fix: now works with Amazon RDS SQL Server Express Edition by skipping the sysjobssteps query like we do with Azure SQL DB. (#2317, thanks Ernesto-Ibanez.)

sp_BlitzWho Changes

Fix: query durations now accurate to the millisecond. (#2286, thanks Adrian Buckman.)

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.

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.