Question

Is there a tool out there that can analyse SQL Server databases for potential problems?

For example:

• a foreign key column that is not indexed
• an index on a uniqueidentifier column that has no FILL FACTOR
• a LastModifiedDate DATETIME column that has no UPDATE trigger to update the datetime
• a large index with “high” fragmentation
• a non-fragmented index that exists in multiple extents
• a trigger that does not contain SET NOCOUNT ON (leaving it suspectible to “A trigger returned a resultset and/or was running with SET NOCOUNT OFF while another outstanding result set was active.”)
• a database, table, stored procedure, trigger, view, created with SET ANSI_NULLS OFF
• a database or table with SET ANSI_PADDING OFF
• a database or table created with SET CONCAT_NULL_YIELDS_NULL OFF
• a highly fragmented index that might benefit from a lower FILLFACTOR (i.e. more padding)
• a table with a very wide clustered index (e.g. uniqueidentifier+uniqueidentifier)
• a table with a non-unique clustered index
• use of text/ntext rather than varchar(max)/nvarchar(max)
• use of varchar in columns that could likely contain localized strings and should be nvarchar (e.g. Name, FirstName, LastName, BusinessName, CountryName, City)
• use of *=, =*, *=* rather than LEFT OUTER JOIN, RIGHT OUTER JOIN, FULL OUTER JOIN
• trigger that returns a results set
• any column declared as timestamp rather than rowversion
• a nullable timestamp column
• use of image rather than varbinary(max)
• databases not in simple mode (or a log file more than 100x the size of the data file)

Is there an FxCop for SQL Server?

Note: The Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Best Practices Analyzer doesn’t fit the bill.

Answer 1

There’s SQLCop – free, and quite an interesting tool, too!