We’re proud to announce that our First Responder Kit is now on Github, and it now uses the MIT open source license.

What This Means for Users

Good news: it’s still free, and now it’ll be updated even more often. If you’re subscribed to update notifications, we’ll still email you monthly when we release new versions.

Today, we’re not announcing a new release – because we’re in the midst of testing a whole bunch of breaking changes:

Parameter names are now all @PascalCase with no underscores. (They used to vary between procs.)

Parameter functions are more consistent – here’s the documentation. Right now, this documentation page is kinda long and unwieldy, and we’ll be splitting that up too over time.

sp_BlitzFirst is about to be renamed – although I have no idea what to call it, and I’ll ask for your help on that one in tomorrow’s blog post.

If you want a stable, high-quality set of code, get the latest release zip. Don’t work with the source code directly unless you’re in a testing environment, because it will break.

What This Means for Consultants and Software Companies

Our prior copyright license said you couldn’t install this on servers you don’t own. We’d had a ton of problems with consultants and software vendors handing out outdated or broken versions of our scripts, and then coming to us for support.

Now, it’s a free-for-all! If you find the scripts useful, go ahead and use ’em. Include sp_Blitz, sp_BlitzCache, sp_BlitzIndex, etc as part of your deployments for easier troubleshooting.

What This Means for Contributors

The contribution process is now way easier:

Search Github issues to see if anyone has requested the feature you’re considering (including closed issues, because sometimes we close stuff that isn’t a good fit for these scripts)

Create a new Github issue so other users can discuss your proposed changes

Fork the project to a local copy – this gives you your own working version that you can test locally

Test your work on case-sensitive instances – ideally, on at least the oldest and newest supported versions of SQL Server (today, 2008 and 2016)

Create a pull request to offer your code back up into the public repo, and moderators will test your code

Bonus: if you’re working towards Microsoft MVP status, you can include open source contributions in your list of community activities. Since these tools are now open source, you get more credit for your work.

Head on over to the Github SQL Server First Responder Kit project, and if you’re interested in watching what happens, click the Watch button at the top right. You’ll get emails as people add issues and create pull requests.

Wanna talk about it live? Join SQLServer.slack.com, and we’re in the #FirstResponderKit channel.