Time Served
I’m gonna be honest with you: I’m not gonna build another First Responder Kit.
It’s established, it’s open source, and it’s badass. I poured a ton of work into it over the years, and starting from scratch seems like a bad use of my time.
I totally encourage you to help continue to build it. I learned a ton working on that stuff, and it was an incredibly valuable and rewarding experience.
I am going to build tooling that I think would be useful but that isn’t covered in there, for things like:
Any Tool Can See
Using any tool that returns a given set of information about wait stats, query plans, indexes, or whatever about SQL Server will show you roughly the same problems.
Roughly. Some better than others. Some I have no idea. Some not so much.
The point is, I can teach you to find problems with the tool you’re using, or help you find a tool that does.
I can also teach you how to solve them.
Nothing New But The Name
My thing over here is coaching. Helping you become better at whatever it is you wanna do.
Every tool is a wrapper for what’s inside SQL Server. Tools are interchangeable, mostly.
Knowing how use and interpret them in a meaningful way is not.
Thanks for reading!
Going Further
If this is the kind of SQL Server stuff you love learning about, you’ll love my training. I’m offering a 75% discount to my blog readers if you click from here. I’m also available for consulting if you just don’t have time for that and need to solve performance problems quickly.
Hey Eric,
This post doesn’t appear for me if I go to your blog page, but the direct link in today’s email did get me here (obviously)
This may be a feature, rather than a bug, in which case please disregard this comment
cheers
ross
It’s working over here, so not sure.
Thank you for all your hard work, Erik! What you’re saying makes sense.
Definitely hoping to take advantage of your services in the near future, as my organization’s SQL Server infrastructure expands.
Hahaha, no need to thank me. I love doing what I do. Look forward to working with you!
My mentor in the SQL Server world, told me that “tools make you stupid”. He followed that up with, he wasn’t opposed to tools as “they can make your life easier, but always try to understand what is going on behind the scenes”. Example being, what DMVs can give you the info you need to work an issue? If I only use tools, eventually my knowledge of the DMVs will be purged from my memory banks. I hope that makes sense.
I basically agree. Tools should be built to make people’s lives easier — especially people who would have no idea what’s going on without them, or the learning curve is too steep for how quickly they need answers. I’m not sure I agree that everyone should be writing DMV queries from scratch, unless they really want to learn (but then it may be a better use of their time to read through existing ones to understand).
Thanks!