I’ve always been a fan of giving back wherever possible.

I work for a software vendor where each customer hosts their own SQL Server on site, which means that I indirectly support about 400 servers around the world, all of which have different hardware specifications and unique things to think about. A lot of what I do is jumping on customer’s sick SQL Servers, working out what’s wrong and working out a solution. I use a number of tools so that I can gather information automatically rather than manually pull it each time.

A major set of tools that I use is the Brent Ozar First Responder Kit. This is an excellent set of tools that give a great range of stats about your SQL Server and links to read further if you’re unsure what the stats mean. This is great for getting people with less experience up to speed and still extremely useful for more experienced users.

I’ve got a .NET tool which runs these scripts (among others) and exports to Excel, such a time saver. I added additional checks on my local versions for things that were specific to what I wanted that weren’t in the main scripts (I still do for certain things that may be unsuitable to be included in the main scripts, see my recent post on sp_regread).

In June 2016 these scripts were open sourced the team open sourced these scripts and put them up on GitHub. After browsing the issue list I decided to help out a little in order to give back and make these scripts even more useful for others. The changes I’ve made aren’t large ones but there is definitely a sense of accomplishment when those pull requests get accepted.

 

This kit gets released once a month and they credit who has coded on the release, it’s nice seeing your name on their release notes (e.g. here and here). It will also not be a bad thing for the old CV when it comes to it, you get your own profile which details what you’ve been contributing on. You even get a cool little graph which tells you the volume of your own contributions.

If you’ve ever seen an open source project that you thought it might be fun to contribute to, I urge you to go ahead and give it a go.