SQL SERVER Tools I Use and Recommend (Updated: May 2020)

The reason, I love my job is that I get to meet new people every single day and I am able to share what I know with them while fixing their SQL Server Performance Comprehensive Database Performance Health Check. The most popular question which I receive is what different third-party tools I use in my daily routine and I recommend them. Here is the updated list for May 2020 of all the tools which I recommend.

Tools I Use May 2020

Here are the different tools and their download links along with it.

• Database Performance Analyzer (Download 1, Download 2) 
• Foglight (Download)
• SpotLight Cloud (Download, Download)
• RedGate (Download)
• SQLGrease (Download)
• Melissa (Download)

Database Performance Analyzer for Performance

I am always delighted when I find this tool installed at my client’s place as that makes my life much easier while helping them optimize their SQL Server Performance. Database optimization takes two forms. One is quickly identifying bottlenecks, pinpointing their root causes, and prioritizing actions. Second, you need a solution to help you proactively optimize poor performing applications by highlighting hard-to-find issues before they cause big problems.

Here are some of the key feature of the tool:

• Intuitive performance analysis
• Blocking analysis
• Database, index, and query tuning advisors
• Real-time and historic monitoring
• Multi-vendor relational database support
• Integration with other SolarWinds products

Call to Action Download DPA or Alternative Link for FREE.

Foglight for Cross-Platform

Foglight cross-platform database software allows you to proactively improve database performance and increase visibility by monitoring all your diverse databases centrally, through a single console. With alerting, diagnostics, performance analytics and more, you’ll easily optimize database health – across your entire environment. I often use it to optimize the server configuration, performance, and utilization of your cloud, hypervisors, VMs and storage, and gain end-to-everything visibility across your hybrid infrastructure.

Here are the important things you can do with Foglight

• Proactively manage and monitor database environments
• Diagnose and tune real-time and historical performance
• Predict and troubleshoot issues
• Increase the health of your database environment

Call to Action Download Foglight

Spotlight Cloud for Free Monitoring

Spotlight Cloud is a database performance monitoring tool that leverages cloud computing to provide 24/7 monitoring and instant diagnostics. Spotlight Cloud Basic isn’t just free for a limited time; it’s free forever. These no-software, low-cost/low-maintenance SQL Server performance monitoring, diagnostic, and tuning solutions allow you to respond instantly to SQL Server issues and pinpoint and fix the highest priority issues with ease.

Here is what we can achieve easily with this tool:

• Free Performance Monitoring
• Resolve Issues Quicker
• Alarm Management
• Performance Diagnostics
• Workload analysis

Call to Action Download Spotlight Cloud

RedGate for Monitoring

In the industry, there’s a need to ensure that the operations teams have full visibility of your estate, not just your production servers. If your engineering teams have access to secure development and testing servers, deployment issues are caught before they reach production. I strongly encourage you to read this whitepaper which discusses:

• Maintaining availability and security at all stages of the development process.
• Keeping visibility and communication flowing between DBA and development teams.
• Removing bottlenecks.
• Identifying and responding to deployment-related performance issues.
• Keeping customers happy and their data secure.

Call to Action Download RedGate Whitepaper

SQLGrease for Simplicity

SQLGrease is the only subscription priced offering capable of providing deep-dive performance monitoring of SQL Server. Not everyone likes to pay upfront a large amount to own a performance optimization tool. SQLGrease is preferred by many clients who prefer subscription-based tools just for SQL Server.

Below is a brief summary of the type of information SQLGrease collects:

• Execution times
• Wait events
• Execution plans
• Execution plan profiles
• IO statistics
• Deadlock analysis
• Tempdb fills
• Session snapshots

Call to Action Download SQLGrease

Melissa for SQL Server Data Quality

It is a Solution to clean, enrich, and match contact records for deeper customer insight, improved communications, and better data management. Without clean and accurate data, it’s hard to find new customers, better understand existing customers’ needs, and increase the lifetime value of every customer – today and tomorrow. Melissa’s Data Quality Components for SSIS is a unique set of global data quality tools for Microsoft’s integration and ETL (extract-transform-load) solution.

Here is what we can achieve easily with this tool:

• Achieve better insight with clean, accurate customer data
• Easily onboard, apply standards, enforce rules, cleanse, and enrich Big Data
• Run data quality on-premise and in the Cloud

Call to Action Download Melissa

Well, there you go, these are the tools I use for my daily routine. Do let me know if you use any of the above tools and share your experience with all of us. The list is updated as of May 2020. You can always follow me on twitter. Let me know what are your favorite tools in May 2020?

Reference: Pinal Dave (https://blog.sqlauthority.com)