First Responder Kit

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…

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:…

We spent Valentine’s Day removing the bugs from your chocolates. You’re welcome. 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,…

My newest class, How I Use the First Responder Kit, has been going great – but there’s a catch. I designed this class as a mix of training and consulting, so I’m giving you advice on your server as we go. Because of that, I can only fit so many people (around 50) per class.…

A couple of times a year, I disconnect from the Internet to sit down with a planning book, my Epic Life Quest, and my future task list. I spend time making sure my day-to-day tasks are still prioritized right. When I do that, I often find out that I’ve lost focus on a particular task,…

It’s the hap-happiest season of all. 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…

This is a pretty doggone big release. There are a lot of improvements to sp_BlitzFirst, sp_BlitzCache, and sp_BlitzWho to prepare for a new release of the First Responder Kit Power BI Dashboard. If you’re using that today, I would strongly recommend updating to this new version of the FRK scripts – they fix a ton…