One of the best parts of the SQL Server community is the abundance of those willing to help others. I don’t know how many times I’ve posted on Slack, Stack Exchange, or other sites asking for assistance and received a prompt well informed reply. There are so many free scripts and tools out there written by some of the best of our brethren that you would be surprised they are giving away for free!

SQL Community on Slack

http://sqlslack.com

If you have never used Slack, it is an excellent communication tool for teams. There are so many rich features I could devote an entire blog post to it. The SQL Community has a slack group that is free to join and has many talented and knowledgeable SQL gurus on it throughout the day and even into the night. You may even run into some famous Microsoft MVPs on there from time to time.

Slack only allows free groups like this to continue to send invites if they retain a high request to accepted invite ratio. So please only sign up if you plan to accept right away.

DBATools.io

http://dbatools.io

This is a PowerShell suite of tools/commands specifically for the SQL Server DBA. There are dozens of categories making up hundreds of commands. If you don’t know PowerShell, you should start learning this tool! You will wonder how you ever got along without it and DBATools is a great open-source toolset that is constantly being updated and maintained by several MVPs.

Ola Hallengren’s maintenance scripts

http://ola.hallengren.com

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away… native SQL server maintenance plans were an accidental DBA’s only option. These were brute force and inflexible ways to ensure your database reliability and integrity. Along came Ola who created his own set of maintenance stored procs and jobs. There are so many options for your backups, integrity checks, and reindexing/stats updates that you’ll surely find something that fits your specific use case.

SentryOne’s Plan Explorer

http://www.sentryone.com/plan-explorer

This tool used to be freemium but now that it’s completely free there is no excuse to not get it! It makes viewing query plans a breeze drawing your attention to warnings and bad estimates on row counts. It really simplifies performance tuning on even the most troublesome of queries.

Brent Ozar’s First Responder Kit

http://www.brentozar.com/first-aid/

Along with being a very prolific blogger and presenter extraordinaire Brent and team created a great tool to help analyze what is going on with your server. This kit has an ever-growing list of tools that provide you with what is going on with your system right now, to an overall health check, to looking for problem indexes and queries, to even a roll it yourself monitoring tool. This is another open-sourced tool that you can help contribute to, as well.

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You could use native SQL commands/tools that Microsoft provides to create your own versions of each of these tools, but why waste a lot of time for no reason?? That is exactly why I love this community! Each one of them decided to give their code/tools out to the community to use so it makes everyone’s lives better.

Do you love all these tools as much as I do? Which is your favorite? I’m sure I missed some other great tools, which ones do you believe should have made this list? Leave a comment below!