Hello, I’m happy to see that the buzz word “Free” did not fail to attract readers. NEVER FEAR! You will not leave this post disappointed.

I’m not going to try and do a better job than John Sansom has already done but I felt that this information needed to be widely distributed.

On that note, I highly encourage you to check out his article here and learn about the great free tools available to us all.

Quick Links:

1. Plan Explorer
2. sp_Blitz
3. sp_BlitzIndex
4. sp_WhoIsActive
5. Management Data Warehouse (MDW)
   1. See one possible problem if this feature is over loaded in my post here.
6. Index Defrag Script 4.1
7. Compression Estimator
8. Central Management Server
9. ClearTrace
10. SQL Server 2012 Diagnostic Information Queries