It’s T-SQL Tuesday time again, and this month the host is Jens Vestergaard(t) whose topic of choice is The Essential SQL Server Tools in my stack
Luckily for me, I started a Handy Tools blog series this year for the sole purpose of sharing all the amazing tools I use on a daily basis, so I was pleasantly surprised when I heard about this topic. I’m excited to read about all of the tools my #sqlfamily uses.
Statistics Parser
Thank you, Richie Rump (t) for this awesome free tool allows you to take the output from statistic io, time and paste it into the web page. It will then parse all that information into a useful and more readable output and aggregate your reads, CPU time, scans, etc at the bottom. This is great if you’re working with a client who doesn’t have all the nifty tools installed but you need to see where the pain is.
Clear Trace
You can import a trace file using ClearTrace and it will normalize and aggregate the data from a SQL Profiler trace. I know, I know, we should all be using XE (Extended Events), sorry Erin Stellato(t), but I still deal with a lot of customers who have SQL 2008/R2 instances, so this makes my life a lot easier. This tool makes it really really easy to analyze trace data and find out where your resources are being spent.
SQL Sentry Plan Explorer
If this wasn’t a free product it would definitely be one I’d pay for (hopefully it stays free). This tool gives you fantastic insight into your query performance along with a fantastic interface to help dig through those horrid execution plans that are unreadable in SSMS.
sp_whoisactive
If you’ve never used this, download it and give it a shot. This is an amazing stored proc developed by Adam Machanic(t)…it’s like sp_who2 on steroids.
Glenn Berry Diagnostic Scripts
If you troubleshoot versions of SQL Server from 2005-2017 + Azure, then you need to check out Glenn Berry’s (t) scripts. These are very helpful when you work with multiple version of SQL Server, you don’t have to maintain a bunch of scripts that work with certain versions, Glenn does it for ya.
https://www.sqlskills.com/blogs/glenn/category/dmv-queries/
drcdba.com 
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