In the first Star Trek Next Gen movie, there was a strange ribbon floating through space which created a personal alternate reality that essentially was a place where all your dreams come true.  This ribbon was affectionately known as The Nexus.  Being inside it was like being on drugs!  People went through withdrawl and did everthing in their power to get back to it if they ever left, or in the movie, were accidentally ripped out.  The crazed inter-spacial terrorist was even willing to blow up an entire planet to get back there. 

At PASS 2006 in Seattle, Ken Henderson and Bart Duncan presented a Skunk-works PSS tool that would automatically analyze the output of SQLDiag. I was amazed, enamored, and even giddy like a..., well, let's just say I was eager to try it out.  So eager, I blogged here about it.  For an independent consultant often called in to figure out performance problems, this could be the alternate reality I've been looking for.  All my hopes and dreams could be rolled up in here.  SQL Nexus purports to have built-in Reporting Services reports for blocking, wait-types, long running queries, how much faster SQL is than Oracle (that last one might be in a future release!)

On my first try to get it working, SQL Nexus itself was the only thing blowing up. I was able to set it up and get the analysis database created (a manual process). However trying to import data from SQLDiag appeared to work, but imported no rows. The reports look like they will be nice, but none of them work if the data has 0 rows.  In fact, they error out.  The parameterization of the reports seems to have a bug, too, as it throws an error for a bad parent reference something or other.

I can only hope that PSS will fund this effort and provide a more ready-for-prime tool. The promise of it is incredible, to the point of addiction. However, it is not quite ready for simple, consumable use.  As of now, it stills seems to be floating out somewhere in space.

If anyone involved with SQL Nexus can comment or provide details, I'd be very happy to hear about it.

Jon