Tools

SSMS v21: Dark Mode, Git, Vertical Tabs, and More

Last Updated February 2, 2025

SQL Server Management Studio v21 Preview 1 is out and let’s give it a quick whirl. It’s installed with the Visual Studio installer. That doesn’t mean Visual Studio is installed or required – it’s not – it’s just that the SSMS team is leveraging the work that the VS folks have put in over the years.…

Community Tools Month: Choose Your Character

Last Updated September 5, 2022

Brent Ozar

Professional Development, Tools

This month on the blog is Community Tools Month, and I’m going to be talking about some of the most useful and influential tools out there. You can’t learn them all – *I* can’t learn them all – because there just aren’t enough hours in the day to do your work, keep your skills sharp,…

How to Find Cool Questions and Answers on DBA.StackExchange.com

Last Updated March 4, 2020

Brent Ozar

Stack Overflow Database

DBA.StackExchange.com is a Stack Overflow site that’s specifically targeted at database administrators. There tend to be some pretty interesting questions in there – not just for SQL Server, but all kinds of databases – but at the same time, there’s also a lot of noise. To help find fun questions, I use The Power of…

What The Consultant Toolkit Does

Last Updated June 10, 2021

Brent Ozar

Consultant Toolkit

It’s one thing for me to tell you how much easier The Consultant Toolkit makes my job and how clients love how much I can tell them about their server during the initial sales call – but it’s another thing to hear it from a happy customer: Thought I would share a story, with my…

Adam Machanic, Japanese Snack Connoisseur

sp_WhoIsActive Is Now Open Source.

Last Updated July 28, 2019

Brent Ozar

Tools

Adam Machanic, Japanese Snack Connoisseur If you’re still using sp_who, sp_who2, and Activity Monitor, listen up: there’s a great free replacement, and it’s now open source, too! sp_WhoIsActive is a much more powerful way to analyze what’s happening right now on your server. Here’s what you need to know: sp_WhoIsActive’s home on Github – releases…

[Video] Getting Started with the Consultant Toolkit

Last Updated February 1, 2019

Brent Ozar

Consultant Toolkit, Videos

You’re a consultant who needs to figure out why your clients’ SQL Servers are slow and unreliable. You’ve collected a bunch of diagnostic queries over the years, but they have a lot of holes, and you don’t really have the time to maintain them – let alone make ’em better. You waste time connecting to…

Announcing the Consultant Toolkit: Now Available in the European Union, too

Last Updated December 29, 2024

Brent Ozar

Consultant Toolkit

Yesterday, I got a barrage of emails and LinkedIn messages that went like this: Hey Brent, about your new consultant toolkit: I really love that idea and would want to get my hands on it. Unfortunately i originate in the EU. I know about your reasoning around not selling to EU members and I don’t…

Announcing the Official Release of the Consultant Toolkit

Last Updated December 29, 2024

Brent Ozar

Consultant Toolkit

You’re a consultant, and you need to get diagnostic data from your clients’ SQL Servers. You’ve been copy/pasting queries and results from SSMS, trying to save execution plans one by one, wasting time doing manual labor. That stops right now. For years, we’ve had our own slick in-house utility that makes the process way easier.…

Consultants: want a utility to gather SQL Server data?

Last Updated January 28, 2019

Brent Ozar

Consultant Toolkit

When you’re a consultant, you need to get diagnostic data from your clients. When you’re talking to a new sales prospect – do you waste a lot of time asking basic investigation questions like what version they’re on, how much data they have, what kinds of workloads they have? You know they’re not really giving…

A Gentle Introduction To the Stack Overflow Schema

Last Updated June 4, 2018

Erik Darling

Stack Overflow Database, Stack Overflow Public Data Dump

Stack: Dumped Wanna learn the schema of the free Stack Overflow public database? If you want the Full Nelson, it’s all documented here. That’s a great resource if you’re looking to learn more, but generally when you’re looking at a data dump and building up demo queries, you wanna get an idea of where the…

Updated (and Smaller!) Stack Overflow Demo Databases

Last Updated January 20, 2018

Brent Ozar

Stack Overflow Database, Stack Overflow Public Data Dump

The place that saves your job The nice folks over at StackOverflow.com (shout out, @onlybluefeet) updated their public data dump last month. This time around, I’m giving you two options: Full size circa 2017/12: 19GB torrent (magnet.) Expands to a ~137GB SQL Server 2008 database. Because it’s so large, we distribute it with BitTorrent – if you’re…

Updated Stack Overflow Database Dump Importer v1.4

Last Updated November 17, 2017

Brent Ozar

Stack Overflow Database

The nice folks at Stack Overflow publish their entire data set (data included) in XML format. It’s tons of fun for demos, but you need a way to get it into a relational database. The Stack Overflow Data Dump Importer (SODDI) makes this point-and-click easy. Just download the latest release, install it, download the XML exports, and…

Things Your SQL Server Monitoring Software Should Tell You

Last Updated August 30, 2017

Brent Ozar

Tools

In our work as consultants, we see a lot of shops that have a monitoring tool, and yet they’re still not able to get to the root cause of a SQL Server performance or reliability issue. In many of these cases, the problem isn’t the people: the problem is that they bought a tool that doesn’t…

sp_AllNightLog: ¿Por que los queues?

Last Updated July 7, 2017

Erik Darling

Backup and Recovery, Clients and Case Studies, ISV and SaaS Database Design, kCura Relativity, Ola Hallengren's Database Maintenance Scripts

Building stuff I sometimes really hate coming up with ideas, and much prefer someone to just say “I want this” so I can go out into the world and figure out how to do that. Occasionally though, I realize that I’m not going to get all that much direction. That’s what happened with sp_BlitzQueryStore. It…

Ola Hallengren’s Maintenance Scripts are Now on Github.

Last Updated June 17, 2017

Brent Ozar

Backup and Recovery, Ola Hallengren's Database Maintenance Scripts

For some of you, the headline is self-explanatory, and you just want the URL, so here it is: https://github.com/olahallengren/sql-server-maintenance-solution For the rest of you, here’s what it means. What are Ola Hallengren’s maintenance scripts? Ola Hallengren’s maintenance scripts are a widely used replacement for maintenance plans. His backup, integrity check, and index optimization stored procedures are…

Stats Week: Only Updating Statistics With Ola Hallengren’s Scripts

Last Updated June 17, 2017

Erik Darling

Index Maintenance, Ola Hallengren's Database Maintenance Scripts

I hate rebuilding indexes There. I said it. It’s not fun. I don’t care all that much for reorgs, either. They’re less intrusive, but man, that LOB compaction stuff can really be time consuming. What I do like is updating statistics. Doing that can be the kick in the bad plan pants that you need…

How to Configure Always On AG Backups with Ola Hallengren’s Scripts

Last Updated March 6, 2019

Brent Ozar

Always On Availability Groups, Backup and Recovery, Ola Hallengren's Database Maintenance Scripts

With SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Groups, you can offload backups to a replica rather than running them on the primary. Here’s how to do it: 1. Install Ola Hallengren’s utility scripts on all of the replicas. During the install, it creates a laundry list of SQL Agent jobs, but doesn’t set up schedules for any of them.…

How to Configure Ola Hallengren’s IndexOptimize Maintenance Script

Last Updated April 14, 2023

Brent Ozar

Index Maintenance, Ola Hallengren's Database Maintenance Scripts

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If you’re a production database administrator responsible for backups, corruption checking, and index maintenance on SQL Server, try Ola Hallengren’s free database maintenance scripts. They’re better than yours (trust me), and they give you more flexibility than built-in maintenance plans. However, the index maintenance defaults aren’t good for everyone. Here’s how they ship: Transact-SQL CREATE PROCEDURE…