First Responder Kit Updates

Summer has turned the corner. Sure, right now the First Responder Kit is wearing its swimsuit, basking in the sun, but already as we speak, the days are getting shorter. It’s only going to be a matter of time before the Pumpkin Spice release of the First Responder Kit. Go outside and take a walk,…

Wow, talk about stable! The last 3 months have only introduced a series of small bug fixes. I held this release back as long as I could, waiting to see if anything major might get added or if we might get a SQL Server 2022 CTP, but no dice. If there was ever a First…

In this release, sp_Blitz shows some information about clusters and AGs, sp_AllNightLog and sp_DatabaseRestore get some love, and more. Wanna watch me use it? Take the class. 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. PowerShell users: run Install-DbaFirstResponderKit…

Just like you, the First Responder Kit has been pretty much stable for the last couple of months. There have been a few small changes, but nothing too big. There are a few pending pull requests that folks are working on around an open source setup checklist, better support for Ola Hallengren’s scripts, and a new…

I’m slowing the First Responder Kit update frequency down to once every 2 months. I know from firsthand experience working with clients that folks just can’t patch quickly enough, hahaha. Folks who want to be on the bleeding edge updates can always use the dev branch in Github, too, getting every new fix the moment…

If you want to quickly understand the top health and performance issues on your SQL Server, there’s no better, easier, free-er way to do it than the open source First Responder Kit. When you find a bug or want something changed, read the contributing.md file. Wanna watch me use it? Take the class. To get…

This month’s release has two gems for SQL Server 2019 users. First, thanks to Greg Dodd, when you’re dealing with parameter sniffing issues, sp_BlitzWho can now show you the cached and live parameters for running queries. This lets you quickly see when the parameters may be wildly different, leading to issues like incorrect memory grants…

Brad McGehee speaking to the Red Gate PASS party, 2011 Ten years ago, I unveiled sp_Blitz at the 2011 PASS Summit, in front of a live audience. Remember the PASS Summit? Remember live audiences? <sigh> Anyway, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of BrentOzar.com, I’ve thinking back about the last couple of decades to reminisce about what I’ve…

Along with the usual bug fixes & improvements, this month’s release includes a brand new sp_BlitzAnalysis script from Adrian Buckman. It’s for folks who have an Agent job to log sp_BlitzFirst to tables every 15 minutes, saving wait stats, Perfmon counters, file stats, etc into tables. sp_BlitzAnalysis reads those tables and sums up activity in…

sp_BlitzLock gets better identification of parallel deadlocks, sp_DatabaseRestore uses Ola’s scripts for logging, and lots of bug fixes this month. Watch and learn 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. PowerShell users: run Install-DbaFirstResponderKit from dbatools Download the…

There’s a bunch of improvements & fixes in this month’s release, but before we get to those, I want to talk about you, dear reader. You make the First Responder Kit possible. When you buy my stuff, you’re funding my work on the First Responder Kit. I couldn’t do this if it wasn’t for you.…

In preparation for this month’s new Fundamentals of Columnstore class, sp_BlitzIndex has a few cool new tricks! I’ll show you how to use ’em for free in the upcoming How I Use the First Responder Kit class, too. Columnstore indexes are kinda like an index on every column (called a segment), and plus they’re kinda…

Let’s give a big round of virtual germ-free applause to Adrian Buckman, Erik Darling, Garry Bargsley, Greg Dodd, Ian Manton, John McCall, Kuldar Andares, Pierre Letter, Stephen Anslow, Tom Butler, and Walden Leverich for volunteering their time to help make your job easier this month. Thanks to them, the September release is chock full of features – I’m not even going to try to sum…

A couple of big new features this month: sp_Blitz’s @SkipChecksServer parameter lets you centralize a list of checks that you want to skip across different servers, and sp_BlitzIndex’s missing index recommendation list now includes the datatypes, making it easier to do index analysis for clients even when you’re not connected to their servers. I have…

I don’t normally do multiple releases per month, but sp_BlitzFirst had a pretty big bug in the last release for those of us who do live performance tuning. In the July release, a well-meaning contributor tried to make sp_BlitzFirst faster when @OutputType = ‘NONE’, but inadvertently also made it faster when @ExpertMode = 1 – by…

This month, 15 community folks contributed code – I think that’s an all-time high for a single month’s release! Good work, y’all. Thanks for payin’ it forward. The bad news is that they’re almost all bug fixes, hahaha. I do love that, though – given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. If you’re working directly…

If you’re saving the contents of sp_BlitzFirst, sp_BlitzCache, and sp_BlitzWho to tables every 15 minutes, you should definitely install this month’s updates. There are several key improvements for you in here to help make it easier to troubleshoot plan cache rollover due to unparameterized queries, plus way easier to gather query plans that are having…

We have quarantined all of the bugs. Many of the bugs. Okay, 7 of the bugs. Hey, we actually added more improvements than we fixed bugs this month! My favorite new things are that sp_BlitzIndex @Mode = 2 now makes it even easier to do disconnected index tuning just purely inside a spreadsheet, and sp_BlitzCache…