Updates for all sp_Check tools – April 2026
April 30, 2026
It’s time again for our monthly updates of our FREE sp_Check stored procedures, so here are the April updates. This month we have way more updates than in March, including recommendations from the Issues section of GitHub, so thank you to all who contributed! We also have been working on the content pages referenced by
Free SQL Server Health Check with dbatools
April 2, 2026
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
Updates for all sp_Check tools – March 2026
March 31, 2026
As promised last month, we are planning for (at least) monthly updates of our FREE sp_Check stored procedures, so here are the March updates. This month we did change the “ReadMore” URL links in the results of all tools to not use redirects. This might have been causing issues for folks who just wanted some
Updates for all sp_Check tools – February 2026
February 28, 2026
It’s been very humbling to get so much encouraging feedback about our sp_Check tools from so many of you, especially for our latest tool sp_CheckAG. What started with a new security check tool (sp_CheckSecurity) has grown to four publicly released tools (including sp_CheckBackup and sp_CheckTempdb) that can help SQL Server professionals with both troubleshooting and
Introducing sp_CheckAG: Check Your SQL Server Availability Groups for Availability Issues
January 21, 2026
SQL Server Availability Groups can be a great feature to help support your High Availability needs, but what happens when they fail to work as expected? Do you have an expiring certificate on used by an endpoint? Do you have timeout settings that could contribute to unexpected failovers? Are you suffering from a high number
Introducing sp_CheckSecurity
April 17, 2024
Are your SQL Servers secure? With new threats to your data emerging daily, it’s a difficult question to answer. And what is even included in the word “secure”? Sure, maybe you’re confident you have security against hacking (or maybe not?), but what about internal security? Are you protected against oops moments? Are there elevated permissions
10 Free SQL Server Resources We Love
February 16, 2023
Featured image photo by Susan Holt Simpson on Unsplash Checking in in March of 2026: Yup, we still love all of these tools. Everybody loves freebies, and the SQL Server community is full of them. Free scripts, stored procedures, blog posts, books, and helpful advice from some of the smartest minds are all available to
SQLwatch.io as a Free Monitoring Tool for Your SQL Servers: A Jr. DBA Review
February 9, 2023
I have been working for Straight Path for a while, and I have grown comfortable with the monitoring tools we use and what we look for on a daily basis. I thought I would branch during our second “Community Tools Month” and try out SQLWatch since it is a free community tool designed to help
Check SQL Server Configuration – Free Script
November 25, 2016
I do a lot of SQL Server Health Assessments on SQL Server environments. I’m always checking sys.configurations to look for problematic instance level configuration settings. I almost always find configurations worth changing. But the approach I’ve always used is a bit manual and I wanted to fix it. So I finally wrote a script to
SQL Sentry Plan Explorer [Free DBA Tool of The Week]
August 5, 2016
In this continuing series, I’m blogging about Free tools for SQL Server DBAs. You can check the whole series out, here. This week we’re talking about and old standard – SQL Sentry Plan Explorer. SQL Sentry Plan Explorer I hope you look at SQL Server execution plans. If you do this in management studio using