Where to Start With This Series
The DBA Scripts series on this blog covers backups, blocking, indexes, SQL Agent, query performance, extended events tracing, server inventory, and security, organized into eight areas of the job, each one tying together a cluster of scripts that answer a related set of questions. That’s a lot of ground, and “where do I actually start” is a fair question whether you’re new to this site or you’ve been inheriting an unfamiliar server every few months for years.
This post is the map above the maps: not a script itself, and not a pillar, but the guide to the pillars. It’s organized around the moments a DBA actually reaches for tooling, not around the categories the scripts happen to live in, so you can start from your actual situation rather than browsing a list.
Eight Areas of the Job
Start with the area that matches your situation, each one opens onto its focused hubs and the scripts underneath.
Start Here: Inheriting an Unfamiliar Server
If you’ve just been handed a server you’ve never seen before, this is the order that builds understanding fastest, each step assumes the last:
- Server Inventory first, always. Version, hardware, configuration, and licensing are the baseline everything else gets read against. Skipping this means every later finding is read without context.
- Backups and Recovery second. Before you touch anything or tune anything, confirm you could actually recover this server if something went wrong during the review itself.
- Security third, because the remediation it prompts is a change like any other. Who has privileged access, what’s actually happening at the login layer, and what auditing infrastructure does or doesn’t exist. This is the review most likely to surface something that changes your priorities for everything after it.
- Storage and Capacity fourth. Confirm there’s actually room to keep operating, disk, database, and filegroup free space, before anything else on this list.
- SQL Agent and Jobs fifth. What’s scheduled to run, whether it’s succeeding, and whether anything’s quietly getting slower. Maintenance jobs you didn’t know existed can explain a lot of otherwise-mysterious server behavior.
- Blocking and Locking, Index Maintenance, and Query and Performance Tuning last, once the foundation is confirmed sane, these three answer “is it fast enough and why not,” in whichever order matches the specific complaint you’re chasing.
By the Question You’re Actually Asking
Sometimes you don’t need the full review, you have one specific problem right now. Here’s the fast path for the moments that come up most.
→ Backups and Recovery, specifically Backup Coverage and Suspect Pages and Integrity Checks
→ Blocking and Locking first to rule out active blocking, then Query and Performance Tuning
→ Security, start with Sysadmin Members and Login Security Audit
→ SQL Agent and Jobs
→ Server Inventory, specifically Edition Feature Usage and Linked Servers
→ Extended Events Tracing
→ Index Maintenance, index health degrades quietly and this is the most commonly overlooked routine check
→ Storage and Capacity, start with Database Free Space Summary and Database Growth Risk and Forecast
→ High Availability, start with AG Failover Readiness and Readable Secondary Usage
Jump Straight to a Popular Script
The most-reached-for scripts in the series, and the question each one answers:
Troubleshooting a Specific Error or Symptom
Not every question fits the pillar structure above. Some things are a specific error message or an active incident, not a survey of a whole area. A parallel Troubleshooting series covers those: step-by-step diagnostic workflows for a live problem, each one still linking back to the real scripts in the pillars above rather than duplicating them.
Related script: Install and Update SSMS via PowerShell
What Makes This Series Different
Every script post follows the same shape on purpose: the real script, a genuine run against a live SQL Server instance with captured output, what a clean result looks like versus a real finding, and links to the scripts that answer the next logical question. Several posts exist because writing the explanation surfaced a real bug in the script itself, fixed and documented, not just described.
These scripts are also searchable by an AI assistant through the sqldba MCP server. Its find_script and get_script tools return the script body along with its safety class, so an assistant leads with the warning on anything that changes the server rather than handing over a command to paste.
Summary
Start with Server Inventory on any unfamiliar server, confirm Backups and Recovery before you touch anything, review Security next, then work outward toward the question that brought you here. For a specific error it’s the Troubleshooting series, for the tool itself the SSMS guide. Bookmark this page, and the pillar you land on next will link you the rest of the way.
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