These are the tools I’ve built over the years to make accessing data a little less painful. Most of them live in the performance-tuning world, where the number you actually need is usually buried under a mountain of output nobody wants to read.
They dig it out for you. Free, no signup, no catch.
StatisticsParser.com
Turn on SET STATISTICS IO, TIME ON, run a gnarly query, and SQL Server hands you back a wall of text — scan counts, logical reads, physical reads, read-ahead reads, and a CPU/elapsed line for every single statement. Now go add all that up by hand across a stored proc that hits fifteen tables. No thanks. Paste it here, hit Parse, and you get clean per-query tables plus a grand total at the bottom.
Why you’d want it: Tuning is a before-and-after game. This makes the “after” numbers instantly comparable to the “before” ones, so you can actually tell whether your change helped or whether you just made things worse with extra steps. It’s free, it’s web-based, and it even parses output in Spanish and Italian.
Statistics Parser SSMS Extension
I love StatisticsParser.com, but I got a little tired of the copy-from-SSMS, alt-tab-to-the-browser, paste, parse dance. So I ported the whole thing to C# and stuffed it right inside SSMS 22.
Run your query with statistics on, right-click in the query window (or hit Ctrl+K, Ctrl+G), and a Parse Statistics tab pops up next to Messages — same readable tables, same totals, no browser required. It even follows your SSMS theme, so it won’t blind you if you live in dark mode.
Why you’d want it: Same payoff as the website, minus the tab-juggling. The parsed output shows up next to your results and auto-refreshes every time you re-run the query. If you tune queries all day, that’s a lot of little annoyances you never have to feel again.
PasteThePlan.com
Sharing a SQL Server execution plan used to be genuinely painful. You’d email a .sqlplan file around, someone would open it in the wrong tool, half the details wouldn’t render, and the forum you posted it on would mangle the XML into confetti.
Grab your plan’s XML, paste it here, and you get a link. That link shows the plan as a real graphical diagram — missing index hints, warning bangs, the works — plus tabs for the query text, the raw XML, and even AI suggestions on what to fix.
Why you’d want it: It’s the fastest way to ask “hey, what’s wrong with this query?” on Stack Overflow, a forum, or in a chat with a coworker. One link and they see everything you see. One heads-up, though — anything you paste is public by design, so scrub out anything your company would consider private before you hit go.
sp_DataProfile
Bad data makes bad decisions. Before you trust a table, you usually want to know some things about it: how many rows are null, how many distinct values a column has, what the min and max look like, whether that “phone number” column is secretly full of email addresses.
I kept writing those same profiling queries by hand on every project. So I wrapped the whole collection into one stored procedure. Install it, point it at a table, and it brings data profiling right into SSMS — no SSIS wizard, no extra tooling.
Why you’d want it: It’s the “get to know your data before you trust it” step, made fast. Perfect for the start of a BI or data-cleanup project, when you need to find the ugly stuff before it finds you.