It's Friday the 13th: what could possibly go wrong with a heavily AI-driven release?
Things are changing fast, and you can blame AI. Seriously. As a tech worker, things are happening fast and furious these days. We released the First Responder Kit just last month, and that was a big update, but thanks to AI, we're able to iterate faster.
sp_BlitzIndex now offers AI advice for a table's indexes. It's as easy as:
sp_BlitzIndex @TableName = 'Users', @AI = 2;
And you get a new result set with advice from ChatGPT or Gemini:
Click on it to see the advice in more detail, in Markdown for easy copy/pasting into client-friendly recommendations:
Including the exact index creation & undo scripts:
For more details on that, check out the new documentation on Getting AI Advice in the First Responder Kit.
Another big set of commits this month: Erik Darling had the brilliant idea to run the FRK scripts through Claude Code for an automated code review. I'm kicking myself for not doing it sooner. It found a bunch of real bugs across the scripts, stuff that slipped past everybody for years, plus a lot of code quality things. You can click on each issue in the below list to see the specific fixes for each proc. Make no mistake, most of these weren't fluffy "your syntax should be better" bugs - these were real bugs, like sp_BlitzLock was over-reporting memory grant values by 8x because a DMV's contents was already in KB as opposed to data pages. That's the kind of bug that humans are rarely going to catch because we rarely do things like compare a query's memory grants between diagnostic tools and their plans.
This release has a breaking change in the AI config tables for sp_BlitzCache (and now, sp_BlitzIndex as well.) We used to have both the AI providers and prompts in the same table, but I needed to normalize that out into two tables now that we're adding AI capabilities to more procs. If you've started playing around with sp_BlitzCache's AI config table, run this script to migrate your configs to the new table structure before running the new version of sp_BlitzCache.
To get the new version:
- Download the updated FirstResponderKit.zip
- Get The Consultant Toolkit to quickly export the First Responder Kit results into an easy-to-share spreadsheet
- PowerShell users: run Install-DbaFirstResponderKit from dbatools
Consultant Toolkit Changes
If you're a consultant that does long term work, maintaining a client's SQL Servers, then you probably want to track the health and performance of those servers over time. You want data - in a database.We've got a new Loader app that watches a folder for incoming zip files, and when one shows up, it processes the data to load it into a SQL Server (or Azure SQL DB) repository for you.
This means you can set up the Consultant Toolkit at your clients on a scheduled daily task, upload the data to S3 (built in) or use your own file sync methods to get it to the location of your choosing, and then have the data automatically loaded into your database server for you.
To learn more about that, read the PDF documentation included with the Consultant Toolkit.
sp_Blitz Changes
- Enhancement: add warning about AI-influencing Agents.md and Consitution.md extended properties being present in user databases. (#3798)
- Enhancement: warn if Automatic Tuning is in a non-default state. (#3800, thanks Reece Goding.)
- Enhancement: skip Google Cloud SQL admin database gcloud_cloudsqladmin. (#3818, thanks Vlad Drumea.)
- Fix: typo in Acclerated Database Recovery Enabled. (#3796, thanks Christophe Platteeuw.)
- Fix: typo in "individial". (#3835, thanks CuriousGeoSq and GitHub Copilot - this was our first completely robot-performed bug fix done inside of Github.com. I was delighted by how easy the process was.)
- Fix: code review by Claude Code found 14 assorted bugs. (#3807 and #3808, thanks Erik Darling.)
sp_BlitzCache Changes
- Breaking change: the last release used a single Blitz_AI table to hold both AI provider configurations and AI prompts. In this release, to support sp_BlitzIndex having its own set of prompts, we split that Blitz_AI table into two tables. This script will migrate the data from old to new tables. (#3823)
- Enhancement: include the CONSTITUTION.md extended database property when building an AI prompt so that your company's code and database standards will (hopefully) be honored. (#3809)
- Fix: performance tuning by removing a duplicate join. (#3791, thanks Connor Moolman.)
- Fix: code review by Claude Code found 16 assorted bugs. (#3806, thanks Erik Darling.)
sp_BlitzIndex Changes
- Enhancement: skip Google Cloud SQL admin database gcloud_cloudsqladmin. (#3818, thanks Vlad Drumea.)
- Enhancement: add AI advice for table-level index review. (#3670, #3827, #3837)
- Enhancement: add more support for JSON indexes. Note that SQL Server itself doesn't appear to track index usage statistics on these indexes, at least not yet as of 2025 CU3. (#3736)
- Fix: in table level detail mode, show details for resumable index builds that are still building for the first time. (#3812, thanks Reece Goding.)
sp_BlitzLock Changes
- Fixes: code review by Claude Code found 9 assorted bugs and a handful of code quality issues. (#3802, thanks Erik Darling.)
- Fix: no longer fails if login doesn't have select permissions on msdb.dbo.sysjobsteps. (#3816, thanks Vlad Drumea.)
sp_BlitzWho Changes
- Fixes: code review by Claude Code found 4 assorted bugs and a couple of code quality issues. (#3803, thanks Erik Darling.)
- Fix: no longer fails if login doesn't have select permissions on msdb.dbo.sysjobs. (#3814, thanks Vlad Drumea.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgYeNISC_A8
For Support
When you have questions about how the tools work, talk with the community in the #FirstResponderKit Slack channel. Be patient: it's staffed by volunteers with day jobs. If it's your first time in the community Slack, get started here.When you find a bug or want something changed, read the contributing.md file.
When you have a question about what the scripts found, first make sure you read the "More Details" URL for any warning you find. We put a lot of work into documentation, and we wouldn't want someone to yell at you to go read the fine manual. After that, when you've still got questions about how something works in SQL Server, post a question at DBA.StackExchange.com and the community (that includes me!) will help. Include exact errors and any applicable screenshots, your SQL Server version number (including the build #), and the version of the tool you're working with.