The one and only Erik Darling (homepage) is doing his best to help us to make our lives easier by providing a fully fledged monitoring solution (two, actually) for SQL Server, all this for free. Yes, FREE: https://github.com/erikdarlingdata/performancemonitor. Due to the nature of my job I can only use the Lite version, not the fully fledged one (so only one monitoring solution, at least for me).
Not only that, but the solution(s) are documented: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLt4QZ-7lfQieiFUIuviNlyK4gcycvFiAI. And one of the videos is even showing you how to use AI to query your servers. Except I personally cannot do that. So here is my setup:
LMStudio: installed locally on a DELL PRECISION, targeting my (not really) local LLMs on a MacBook Pro via LM Link. Dead easy to set up, not even going there, especially since your setup will most likely have your LLMs locally and not on a remote machine (oh, the irony) like I do.
VS Code with LM Studio for Copilot Chat (Dan Lambiase) – updated fairly regularly, dead easy to set up.
Not really related to this, but I have Continue as well, for chatting, rewrites, etc. (https://continue.dev/) – except they are now part of Cursor, so I have no idea where this goes.
Now for the fun part: Erik shows you how to use AI to query your servers with Claude. That is a no-go for me, for both financial and, more importantly, sensitive data reasons. So I tried to point a different tool/extension to the MCP server. Quick Google search and Cline seems to be the one to choose (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=saoudrizwan.claude-dev).
I have no idea why, but it would not install for me, so eventually I downloaded the *.vsix file and was able to install it that route.
This is how it looks as of now:
Now you need to point Cline to the MCP server (the bottom icon, fyi). Erik is more than kind, will even give you the command to run in the command prompt for it to work.
Click The Cop_y Setup Command (don’t ask) and run the command in the console:claude mcp add --transport http --scope user sql-monitor http://localhost:5151/.
Except no, it doesn’t work. Because you need Claude Code, which I am not willing to pay for. So quick search again, and it seems you don’t need Claude, you can set up the config file for Cline directly (disregard the two MCP servers set up, we only care about sql-monitor):
{
"mcpServers": {
"sql-monitor": {
"autoApprove": [],
"disabled": false,
"timeout": 60,
"type": "streamableHttp",
"url": "http://localhost:5151"
}
}
}
And the result:
No bueno. Back to Google search – it turns out that you CAN install Claude Code for free. You just cannot really use it – perhaps you can, when I tried it threw me to a login page where everything seemed to be paid. Anyway, in Powershell, run: irm https://claude.ai/install.ps1 | iex. Once complete, run again:claude mcp add --transport http --scope user sql-monitor http://localhost:5151/. This time it works.
For Cline, I deleted all the servers I created and recreated a new one with the above settings and presto!, it works now.
Topics not covered:
- how to set up the rest of the tools
- how to set up VS Code to use a local LLM and not a frontier model
- the performance (readable but very slow due to limited performance of the local machines, etc).
My two cents:
- if you have the money to invest, go with frontier models as long as you are not pushing more than 200 USD/month – anything beyond that and the economics will start to fail, at least in my case. Of course, this assumes you are not working with sensitive data
- I am not a huge fan of agentic AI, not in the current form – it fails spectacularly, and it fails on your time and dime
- if you have money to burn, wait for the new Mac Studio or similar stuff – something tells me it will push past beyond 15K USD for the ones that can host decent models. But I deeply distrust the learning process of any LLM as of now, not to mention the “guardrails”; as of August 2026 all the major frontier providers reported their agents going rogue and creating havoc online. In a normal world this is a felony punishable by law. These days, is a badge of honor. Thanks but no thanks.
SQL-PLAY 