This month for T-SQL Tuesday #101 Jens Vestergaard asks us to blog about the essential tools in our SQL Toolbelt.
I’d just completed by post on CMS when I realised I’ve blogged about a few of my favourite tools in the past and that this would be a good opportunity to share them again in a quick post. So, here’s my second of two T-SQL Tuesday posts.
First we have these two great tools:
Statistics Parser – If you do performance tuning and you’re not using this then you’re missing out. Formats and summarises the results of your STATISTICS IO and TIME commands. Big shout to Richie Rump for creating this – I use it so much I just need to type “st” in my browser search and it comes straight up!
Live Query Stats – Watch an animated execution plan while your query executes. I’ll admit I’ve not used this a lot but I still think it’s really cool tool.
And then a few different ones around the same tool:
Query Store – track query performance and plan changes over time as well as forcing SQL to use the plan you want. I’m lucky to have quite a bit of stuff on SQL 2016 and Query Store is great! I was just using it minutes ago to look at how a performance fix put in last week has improved things.
Clone Database with Query Store – If you want to see how your queries would behave in your production environment then Clone Database copies out the stats used to generate the plan. With SQL 2016 you can also a copy of your query store data so you can query away at it happily in your dev environment.
Capture the most expensive queries across your instance with Query Store – blowing my own trumpet a bit here, but I’ve used this script a lot since I wrote it.
That’s it for now – at least for tools I’ve written about – I look forward to seeing what the rest of the T-SQLT community comes up with.
