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Category: Tools

PlanTrace Support for PostgreSQL

Eduardo Pivaral has updated a website:

When I built PlanTrace, it was a Redshift-only tool. Paste your EXPLAIN output, get an interactive graph, cost heatmap, and tuning insights — all client-side, nothing stored. It worked well, but Redshift is only part of the picture for most teams.

PostgreSQL is where most development happens, where staging environments live, and where a lot of production workloads run. So I extended PlanTrace to support it — same interface, same zero-friction flow, automatic engine detection.

Click through to see how it works.

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Writing SQL-Only Extensions for Postgres

Shaun Thomas writes an extension:

Recently at Postgres Conference 2026 in San Jose, I presented a talk called Let’s Build a Postgres Extension! Since that entire presentation was primarily focused on writing a C extension while exploring the Postgres source code, I only mentioned pure SQL extensions as an aside. But what’s more likely in the Postgres community in general: C devs, or people who know SQL?

It turns out that you can do a lot with functions, triggers, views, tables, and various other Postgres-native capabilities. The extension system doesn’t care whether the contents are compiled C or plain SQL. It just wants a control file, a SQL script, and an optional Makefile to help with installation.

So let’s build a relatively trivial extension article entirely in SQL.

It’s a fairly neat capability, for sure.

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April Updates for Straight Path Solutions sp_Check Procedures

Jeff Iannucci shares some updates:

We also have been working on the content pages referenced by the URLs in the stored procedures. We’ve been going through them all to make sure the content was more helpful. Lots of the previous content pages have had simple sentences that weren’t very descriptive, so we’ve been filling those out to provide more explanations.

This month the updates are mostly corrections, although there were additional checks added to sp_CheckBackup and sp_CheckTempdb.

Click through for the changelogs and links to the procedures.

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Alerting on Long-Running SQL Queries and SQL Agent Jobs

Temidayo Omoniyi sends an e-mail:

Have you ever waited for an eternity, waiting for either a query or SQL Agent Jobs to run? This is something most Data Warehouse Developers face daily.

Click through to see how you can use database mail to track long-running tasks. My primary hang-up with solutions like this is, what are you going to do about the e-mail? If there is no concrete action you can take, the most likely outcome will be to ignore the e-mail. This makes it harder to sift out the true positive you need to look into versus the false positives that happen every day.

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Thoughts on Database Projects in SSMS 22.4

Andy Brownsword shares some thoughts:

Last month in SSMS v22.4, we had the Database DevOps (preview) workload introduced which brings with it Database Projects. Last week I shared my favourite features for them which make deployments amazing.

But if you’ve tried them out in SSMS you might have noticed that not everything is present. It’s a preview, after all. So what can we do today?

Read on for that answer.

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Using the Performance Monitor Lite Dashboard

Erik Darling has a new video:

In this video, I dive into the Lite dashboard of my free open-source monitoring tool, which has garnered significant attention with over 10,000 installs based on GitHub repo stats. I highlight its user-friendly nature, especially for consultants or those who can’t install software on client servers, as it allows you to collect a wide range of performance metrics without the need for a separate database. I also showcase how DuckDB, an embedded analytics database, powers the Lite dashboard, ensuring fast query performance and efficient storage through Parquet file compression, making it an ideal solution for monitoring Azure SQL databases and other environments.

Click through for the video. You can grab a copy of the Lite edition, as well as the also-free Full edition, on Erik’s GitHub repo.

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OneLake File Explorer now GA

Harmeet Gill announces general availability of OneLake File Explorer:

Imagine this scenario: You’re a data engineer working with files on your local machine—CSV extracts, Excel files from the business, or intermediate outputs generated on your PC. Your goal is to run a Fabric pipeline, explore the data in a notebook, or train a model in Microsoft Fabric.

Traditionally, that means uploading files through a browser, writing scripts to push data into the lake, or coordinating with someone else who has access. It works—but it adds friction.

OneLake File Explorer removes that friction by bringing OneLake directly into Windows File Explorer.

It’s taken about 3 years to get to this point, but I’m glad to see it get past the preview hurdle.

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Tracking Resource Utilization in Performance Monitor

Erik Darling has another video tutorial:

In this video, I delve into the resource metrics tabs of the full dashboard from my free SQL Server performance monitoring tool. I explain how these tabs provide more detailed information compared to the lighter version, including CPU utilization, TempDB usage, memory usage, and a selection of perfmon counters. The goal is to help you quickly identify when your server might be experiencing issues by showing real-time data and historical trends that can pinpoint specific performance bottlenecks. I also highlight how the weight stats section helps in understanding wait statistics, making it easier to diagnose problems related to resource contention and query compilation.

Click through for the video.

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Query Performance Tabs in Performance Monitor

Erik Darling has a new video:

In this video, I dive into the query performance tabs within my full dashboard, a free and open-source SQL Server monitoring tool. I highlight key features such as the QueryStore subtab, which provides detailed insights into query execution plans and regressions over time, helping you identify and address performance issues more effectively. Additionally, I explain how the custom trace patterns tab offers valuable data for safeguarding against overlooked performance anomalies, ensuring a comprehensive view of your SQL Server’s health.

Click through to see these capabilities.

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Building a Health Check with dbatools

David Seis has a dashboard:

After a longer break than expected, I am back to the dbatools for SQL Server DBAs blog series, and this one is a monster! In fact, this project is so big that I think it will be better to release it incrementally. This will allow you clone the repository, test and modify it in your own environment and come back for free updates over the weeks/ months to come. It is designed to allow you to customize it to your environment’s needs. This first post will be the initial process overview as well as the first set of checks and how to navigate the report.

Click through to see what David has in store.

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