PerformanceStudio is an open-source GUI for SQL Server performance troubleshooting. It helps DBAs and developers inspect execution plans, identify heavy queries, and move faster from symptoms to root cause. The project is led by Erik Darling, with major plan-analysis work from Erik Darling and Joe Obbish.
As SQL Server experts, we contributed mainly to the Query Store analysis experience. Query Store is extremely powerful, but when you need to find the real culprits quickly, raw grids are not enough.
Our goal was simple: make Query Store easier to explore, filter, group, and correlate.
We improved the Query Store part with:
- bar graphs inside metric cells to spot expensive queries faster;
- a time slicer to focus on performance peaks;
- hourly wait-time consolidation to see where waits accumulate;
- better grouping, including query hash and module-level analysis;
- multi-Query Store dashboards to start from data instead of digging blindly;
- query history over the selected time range;
- direct access to query plans for deeper tuning analysis.
Multi Query Store
When you have more than 10 databases in a instance, digging blindly into each query store is tiring so we add a multi-query stores dashboard to help and see which databases consume the most.
Time Slicer
Plan Analysis
This makes the workflow more natural: identify the heavy workload, isolate the peak, group related queries, inspect waits, then open the execution plan.
From there, PerformanceStudio's plan-analysis engine takes over. Erik Darling and Joe Obbish did most of the work in that area, including warnings, scoring, and actionable analysis. Recent releases also continue to improve wait-stat and benefit-based diagnostics. The underlying direction is to rank findings by likely impact instead of flooding users with noisy warnings.
Minimap and color coding on links
PerformanceStudio is becoming a practical bridge between Query Store, wait analysis, and execution-plan tuning. For us, the most valuable improvement is the ability to start with the workload data, identify the real culprits, and then move directly into plan-level investigation.
Need Help ?
If you want to better understand your SQL Server workload, investigate Query Store findings, or tune your databases, feel free to contact us. We know PerformanceStudio from the inside because we contribute to it, and we bring hands-on SQL Server expertise to help turn diagnostics into concrete actions.
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