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Category: Tools

A Performance Monitoring Update

Published 2026-08-10 by Kevin Feasel

Erik Darling has a new video:

Erik Darling here with Darling Data, the one, the only, the monitoring tool mogul of SQL Server. Today I wanted to sort of update people on the state of the performance monitor project because there are some things that are useful to the general population that I feel like I should bring up.

So the current version of the performance monitor is 3.1. If it’s been a while since you’ve tried this thing out, I would suggest giving it another shot because there have been some really, really big improvements, not only in the collected data and sort of visualization and printification of things, but also in the UI, UX, the sort of experience that you get out of it.

Click through for the video and make sure you don’t get sucked into any organ harvesting rings. They may sound alluring at first, but they never work out the way you want them to.

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Database Refactoring with VS Code

Published 2026-07-29 by Kevin Feasel

Drew Skwiers-Koballa shows off some functionality:

SQL database projects are a fundamental tool for keeping your database in source control, tracking changes and collaborating on quickly evolving database needs. Not to be forgotten, their superpower is being able to dynamically generate deployment scripts that match the declared state and the exact environment you’re deploying to. SQL project development becomes more challenging when a database needs serious changes, where the requirements of the system have evolved to the point of having to rename tables and move objects between schemas.

This should be pretty familiar to people who have worked with various iterations of database projects in Visual Studio over the years.

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SSMS Tools in VS Code

Published 2026-07-02 by Kevin Feasel

Denny Cherry has a new VS Code extension:

Are you a user of VS Code, but you wish that the MSSQL extension had more of the SQL Server Management Studio features? Good news, there’s now a VS Code Plugin that gives you those capabilities in VS Code by using the “SSMS Tools for SQL Server” extension.

Click through to see what it includes. There’s a pretty decent amount of existing SSMS functionality in this extension, especially on the database administrator side, where Azure Data Studio and VSCode historically have not focused.

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An Introduction to Spindle

Published 2026-07-02 by Kevin Feasel

Jonathan Stewart has an open-source tool:

A client wanted to see a feature that I had previously built for another customer. I obviously couldn’t just use real client data. When I used Faker and other tools like that, I got data that looked fine on its own but fell apart when I needed relational integrity such as needing an order to point to a customer which points to an address. AdventureWorks, Contoso, WideWorldImporters and the like are great for what they are, but they are either too small, too clean or not relevant to the demo.

I needed data that would not only look the part for the subject, but also follow relationships, have proper distributions, and so on.

So I built Spindle.

I’ve used Spindle for work purposes. It’s a good product for generating artificial data, either from one of the default data domains (e.g., HR, insurance, health care, manufacturing) or based on an existing database schema.

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sp_Check Tool Updates for June 2026

Published 2026-07-01 by Kevin Feasel

Jeff Iannucci has a list of updates:

Anyhow, we have a few months’ worth of updates for our FREE sp_Check stored procedures, so here are the June updates. And not only do we have more updates and checks for you, our repos now feature enhanced README files that have even more helpful information as well as a listing of every check in each stored procedure. Yes, really!

We hope these new updates can help make your job even easier, especially at proactively identifying issues. Here are the updates for June 2026, with links to the GitHub repositories where you can download the latest versions.

Click through for the changelog and links to where you can grab the procedures.

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Goodbye, SQL ConstantCare and Consultant Toolkit

Published 2026-06-17 by Kevin Feasel

Brent Ozar breaks the news:

About ten years ago, I sketched out an idea for a different kind of SQL Server monitoring tool: one that gathered data just once per day, and gave you a short email with a specific list of actionable tasks to make a difference in health and performance.

Richie Rump did an amazing job of building SQL ConstantCare out in the years since, building a solution that was rock-solid and scaled well to terabytes of monitoring data. Every day, we sent thousands of emails for SQL Servers around the world.

This month, we shut off sales and began decommissioning it. Here’s why.

Click through for the reasons. Brent is still maintaining the First Responder Toolkit, so things like sp_Blitz will still be around. But I will miss the quarterly graphics of who’s using which versions of SQL Server, even if I always had to give the “This is a biased sample and may not be indicative of the entire population, but it’s still an interesting and informative sample” spiel each time.

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Tabular Editor CLI Preview Available

Published 2026-06-01 by Kevin Feasel

Ruben Van de Voorde makes an announcement:

We are happy to launch the Limited Public Preview of the Tabular Editor CLI, a cross-platform command-line interface that gives humans, AI agents, and CI/CD pipelines headless access to Tabular Editor features. In practice, that means driving Tabular Editor by typing commands instead of clicking through the app. That may sound like extra work for a one-off edit, and it is. The payoff comes when the task repeats: a command is text, so you can save it, version it, and run it again later or unattended, while a click in a dialog does the job once and is gone. Whether you want to script bulk edits across dozens of models, let a coding agent work on your semantic model directly, or automate deployments in your build pipeline: the TE CLI is built for it, on Windows, macOS, and Linux.

This will be free until the end of September, after which point you’d need a Tabular Editor 3 license to continue using it.

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PSBlitz 6.1.0 Released

Published 2026-05-28 by Kevin Feasel

Vlad Drumea has a new version of PSBlitz:

For anyone not familiar with PSBlitz: it’s a PowerShell-based tool that outputs SQL Server health and performance diagnostics data to either Excel or HTML, and saves execution plans and deadlock graphs as .sqlplan and .xdl files.

If you’re familiar with Oracle, this is pretty much my attempt of a SQL Server equivalent to Oracle’s AWR report.

Feel free to check out the blog post announcing PSBlitz 4 years ago, as well as the 3 year anniversary post.

Read on to see what Vlad has added.

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StatisticsParser Extension to SQL Server Management Studio

Published 2026-05-20 by Kevin Feasel

Brent Ozar announces a new extension:

If you do a lot of query tuning, you’ve probably come across Richie Rump’s StatisticsParser.com. Now, it’s even easier to use.

Now, it’s even easier to use. Download & install it, then run your query with SET STATISTICS IO, TIME ON, and after it finishes, right-click in the query window and click Parse Statistics:

Read on for more information on the extension, as well as the state of extensions in SSMS. Erik Ejlskov Jensen has also picked up the gauntlet and built an SSMS extension gallery.

I will say that the Visual Studio Code world is in significantly better shape in this regard, though the SQL Server tooling is in significantly worse shape there. Life is full of trade-offs, after all.

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Semantic Sonar: Canary Testing Power BI Semantic Models

Published 2026-05-14 by Kevin Feasel

Jens Vestergaard has a new tool:

Quarterly sales season always brings the same ritual: a business user opens Power BI, clicks into the sales dashboard, and waits for the numbers to load. It has been a while since anyone looked at this particular report. The numbers look off. Someone hits refresh. The spinner turns, but the data does not budge. The last refresh was weeks ago.

That is when the emails start. “Can you check why the sales model hasn’t updated?” The support thread grows. IT investigates. The answer is usually not in the data. The refresh failed at 3 AM. Or the data source changed its connection string last Tuesday. Or someone revoked the service principal without telling anyone.

By the time the root cause is found, the report has been open in meetings for hours, and the numbers have been wrong for days.

Read on for a free tool that can prevent this sort of issue.

I think the biggest IT super-power is the ability consistently to troubleshoot a problem from limited information. The second-biggest super-power is the ability to discover issues before the people who rely on your services do. Then you get them fixed and they have no idea there was even a potential problem.

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