Here is a list of some of the most popular (and useful) free scripts and queries I’ve seen around the interweb. There are lot’s more and I’ll be adding them as I’m reminded of them.

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Brent Ozar Unlimited

These guys seem to be putting out a script a week these days but they are still some of the highest quality and amazingly useful

• sp_Blitz A general health check of your instance.
• sp_BlitzIndex All you ever wanted to know about your indexes.
• sp_AskBrent Troubleshoot your slow server.

 

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Adam Machanic

sp_WhoIsActive Want to know who working on your instance at the moment? This is it.

 

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Midnight DBAs

Minionware The Midnight DBAs are producing an ever expanding set of DBA tools that are truly amazing. These tools are simple to install and configure but are extremely versatile. And best of all free! But be forewarned, they really like documentation. Hour after hour of video and hundreds of pages of documentation are available (so far).

Thus far they have:  

• Minion Reindex
• Minion Backup
• Minion Enterprise – This one isn’t free but I’ll mention it anyway because it’s part of the set.
• Minion CHECKDB – Coming soon

 

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Ola Hallengren

SQL Server Backup, Integrity Check, and Index and Statistics Maintenance Need a place to start? Or to finish for that matter. Here it is.

 

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Paul Randal

Wait statistics, or please tell me where it hurts This is an awesome blog entry on wait stats with a great query to tell you what your instance is waiting on.

 

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Dave Wentzel

Dave has a nice script for managing job history

 

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Richie Rump

Statistics Parser This is a nice web based parser for the output of STATISTICS IO and STATISTICS TIME.

SQL Generator Another great web tool from Richie, this one will help you build your PIVOT query for you. And if PIVOTs aren’t something that come naturally to you (they don’t for me) this can really save your bacon.

 

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Paul Brewer

sp_RestoreScriptGenie This is a very nice restore script generator. There is a T-SQL version and a PoSH version.
Note: It pulls the data from msdb so may not work in a DR situation.

 

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Me

Where is my backup? This is a good query to find out where your backups are going.

Looping through multiple servers in SSIS. I posted a three part loop through to create an SSIS package that can walk through multiple instances.

Creating a comma delimited list in a query. Technically this is about the STUFF function but it has a great pattern for creating a comma delimited string from a query.

Clean up your windows logins. The best method is in the comments.