Browsing the blogs, wondering what new tools and techniques people were getting excited about at Tech Ed, I was led to Bill Ramos's site, and a particular post about Activity Monitor in SSMS 2008. I've had SQL 2008 installed for well over a year now, but never really taken special notice of Activity Monitor. I regarded it as a fairly insubstantial tool that one used to get a "finger in the air" feel for the processes that might be causing blocking on your servers, but not much else.

Bill's blog proved me wrong. In it he shows how to pull up a list of "recent expensive queries". A simple right-click allows you to generate the execution plan for one of those queries. The plan appears, and highlighted in green in the header are details of a missing index for that query! Another click and you've generated a script that you can execute to create the missing index.

The technique is beautiful in its simplicity and left me smacking my forehead in wonderment. How on earth can one use a tool for so long without becoming aware of a gem like this? Tools expand, some might say bloat, at an alarming rate and it's often the case that, in amongst all the clutter, the most valuable features somehow elude us.

I invite your nominations for a simple feature, of any tool, that changed your life but was staring you in the face for ages before you discovered it.

Cheers,

Tony.