This month's T-SQL Tuesday topic asked "What code would you hate to live without?" Turns out you like using script and code to automate boring, repetitive, and error-prone tasks.
Thank you to everyone who participated; I was nervous that July holidays and summer vacations would stunt turnout, however we wound up with 42 posts!
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Without further ado, here are this month's entries sorted in random order:
- Stuart Moore shares the history behind needing to automate restore testing and writing the SqlAutoRestores PowerShell module to help. Nowadays his commands are found in dbatools. Great example of how a project can evolve through the community.
- Arthur Daniels shares his script to identify the key and included columns of indexes in a given table.
- Glenn Berry shares his DMV Diagnostic Queries and the story behind how he started developing them back in 2006.
- Jason Brimhall links to multiple scripts he's shared in the past as well as a new script for remotely auditing server access to catch infilitraters red-handed.
- Doug Purnell talks about how he uses database snapshots and shares some code for how he manages them.
- Jay Robinson shares two C# extensions (shout to my fellow devs!): one to check an enum for a value and a second to cleanly handle the lengthy DBNull.Value syntax.
- Drew Furgiuele shares how he scripts out his indexes to re-apply after snapshot replication. He then writes very similar functionality using PowerShell in only 6 lines!
- Tim Weigel shares which community scripts he uses regularly, as well as sharing his own scripts around replication, stored procedure execution information, and file manipulation.
- Hugo Kornelis submitted two posts. The first post shares sp_metasearch which helps with performing impact analysis and the second post follows up with an enhancement he's made to Ola Hallengren's database maintenance scripts to ignore backup BizTalk databases.
- Andy Mallon shares his comprehensive script for checking database, file, data, log, etc... sizes. Great explanations of his reasoning for writing the queries the way he did.
- Dan Clemens shares his database search script with a switch that includes searching across agent jobs.
- Jess Pomfret wrote a script that shows compression stats for database objects. Wanting to run it against a whole instance (or across mulitple servers), she wrote a dbatools command to automate the process.
- Kenneth Fisher shows us how he organizes his toolbox using an SSMS solution.
- Rob Farley shares code he's written to demonstrate the pain of using NOLOCK.
- Steve Jones shares a procedure from Microsoft that he uses for transferring logins and passwords between instances.
- Kevin Hill shares two scripts he uses for finding low-hanging index optimization fruit: one that finds queries performing heap or clustered index scans, and another that returns the top 5 missing indexes per database.
- Michael Villegas learned that Azure SQL doesn't allow you to graphically show user roles and permissions, so he wrote a script to query those details (works for on-premise SQL Server as well).
- Nate Johnson shares scripts that identify if tables are being replicated, whether SSRS subscriptions executed, and how much space certain objects and files are consuming.
- William Andrus shares how he uses his search script to find similarly named fields or all instances of a piece of text within a database.
- Bert Wagner (me!) I share my template for generating dynamic table-driven code, making queries more adaptable to future changes.
- Rudy Rodarte shows us a script he uses for iterating over a date range to use for executing date based queries.
- Brent Ozar admits he can't live without sp_Blitz, but this month he shares a script for checking how much plan cache history exists on a server.
- Jeff Mlakar offers a solution for taking all databases on an instance offline (and then back online) again.
- Erik Darling offers a solution for constructing dynamic SQL so that his MAX variables don't get truncated. He also links to a script for printing long strings in SSMS.
- Chrissy LeMaire takes the hard work out of instance to instance migrations by sharing her single-line dbatools command that will do it all for you. She also shares how dbachecks automates manual checklist work.
- Glenda Gable mentions two procedures, one that is a high performance cursor rewrite and one that is a robust log shipping solution.
- Aaron Bertrand shows us how he discovers undocumented SQL Server features by comparing new builds to the previous versions.
- Ryan Desmond writes about his post-install confirguration process and shares code he runs to customize Ola Hallengren's maintenance scripts for his environments.
- Josh Simar shares his database file size code that is optimized for "very large databases" that span multiple files and filegroups.
- Sander Stad discusses the importance of sharing code and offers a few dbatools commands that he's contributed to or authored around backup testing, log shipping, and SQL Server Agent manipulation.
- Andy Levy wrote an SSMS snippet to generate a cursor. Before you chew him out though, he has some really good uses cases for needing to use them.
- Andy Yun reveals what's in his T-SQL toolbox and explains his organization strategies for 10+ years of scripts he's collected.
- Eduardo Pivaral shares a script he uses to output query results into an HTML table, making it easy to copy into an email.
- Raul Gonzalez shows us a versatile script for searching database tables and returning information on attributes such as column name, size, key definitions, and more.
- Matthew McGiffen wanted to find the most expensive queries on an instance using Query Store instead of the traditional DMVs, so he wrote a script to do just that.
- Daniel Hutmacher shares his beefed up version of sp_help. Includes ASCII art dependency graphs and database search.
- Christian Gräfe provides a function he wrote for padding the left-side of a value with zeros.
- Adrian Buckman shares his SQLUndercover Inspector HTML reporting tool, as well as scripts for helping to alter AG groups, checking for running jobs, and auditing failed logins.
- Louis Davidson shares his technique for using relative positioning in date tables to make querying custom periods (eg. your company's fiscal month) easier.
- Lance England shares a PowerShell script to automate generating upsert merge statements for his ETLs.