Since I didn’t even come close to making it in time for this month’s T-SQL Tuesday, I figured I’d highlight my 5 favorite posts from the community, and then share a few of my own tips/tools.
I use a Central Management Server too, and although I don’t often use it to run a query against multiple instances, it’s definitely a handy built-in feature to take advantage of. A minor downside is that it only supports Windows Authentication (not SQL logins), so I can’t use it for my AWS RDS instances, nor for the CMS server itself — those I have to keep stored in my local “Registered Servers” section. Another tool for running queries against multiple instances, with a good deal more flexibility, is Red Gate’s MultiScript, though it’s not free. ;o)
Ethervane Echo, a clipboard manager and history-remember-er, is similar to something I use called Clipboard Fusion — in fact, it might even be better. And who doesn’t love dbatools and dbachecks ? If you’re not using them yet, don’t wait; start getting into PowerShell today by at least trying out some of the ‘get’ cmdlets from dbatools.
Telegraf looks absolutely stunning, as a monitoring system. It does take some setup work and some maintenance, but it’d be a great branch-out learning opportunity to touch a few different technologies that a traditional SQL DBA might not normally think of. Hats off to the people behind that, and may it continue to grow.
Leave it to Bert to go “outside the box” a bit, with these tools that help you be a better presenter and collaborator. I use BeyondCompare, which is similar to WinMerge (tho, again, not free); I’ve fallen in love with its features that go beyond file diff/merge, but it’s nice to have a free option whenever I’m not on my main machine.
This is a broad sweeping post but it captures a LOT of what the community is and should be. We’re inclusive, we want people to participate, grow & learn from each other, and ultimately advance their careers. Tons of useful gems in here, from the Slack workspace to the event links to the networking advice. Excellent stuff; go read it.
Honorable mention:
The SQL DB Modeler beta looks really interesting as an alternative to traditional big-$$$ tools like ER/Studio & Erwin. If only I wasn’t stuck in brown-field legacy data models 95% of the time… =D
And finally, although they’ve probably been mentioned a few times already, pastetheplan and statisticsparser are two amazingly simple tools from the Brent Ozar folks that make sharing and comparing query performance so much easier. My M.O. is to use PasteThePlan links in a dba.stackexchange post so that others can easily see the graphical execution-plan to offer feedback; while I use StatisticsParser to compare between A/B-testing runs of a stored-proc I’m trying to refactor & improve.
nate_the_dba 