RML Utilities For SQL Server Performance Administration

Microsoft Downloads - RML Utilities for SQL Server (x86) / RML Utilities for SQL Server (x64)

"Do you know which databases or applications are using the most resources on your server? How will a service pack upgrade, configuration change or application change affect your production SQL Server? The RML Utilities for SQL Server provide you a set of tools and processes to answer these questions and much more.

The RML utilities allow you to process SQL Server trace files and view reports showing how SQL Server is performing. For example, you can quickly see:

Which application, database or login is using the most resources, and which queries are responsible for that

Whether there were any plan changes for a batch during the time when the trace was captured and how each of those plans performed

What queries are running slower in today's data compared to a previous set of data

You can also test how the system will behave with some change (different service pack or hotfix build, changing a stored procedure or function, modifying or adding indexes, and so forth) by using the provided tools to replay the trace files against another instance of SQL Server. If you capture trace during this replay you can use the tools to directly compare to the original baseline capture." [Description Leached in Full]

The included XPS format documentation is 184 pages... Also you'll want to read them before you launch the app (yeah, I know that hurts, but there's some pre-setup you have to do, databases to create, etc).

It's cool in that it appears this will work remotely once the PrecisionPerformance DB is created on a given SQL Server.

I'll be playing with this in the coming couple days as I really want to see "What queries are running slower in today's data compared to a previous set of data"...

 

Update 12/18/2007 @ 9:00 AM PST:

In reading the doc's this utility is for SQL Server 2005 & SQL Server 2008.

Also it's not for the light-hearted. It's a "get your hands dirty" type of utility... (think command line stuff, with GUI icing )