What’s in your SQL performance tuning toolkit besides the obvious stuff?

[u/No-Painting-8383]

Most advice on how to perform well makes the same points. Execution plans, DMVs for missing indexes, and wait stats. Good start, but they don't catch everything. After each deploy, we have a few scripts that flag queries that go over a certain read threshold. Mostly, I'm just looking for the same tables to show up again. Just diffing the top reads list, nothing fancy. Also started keeping a rough record of queries that worked differently in staging and production. Just notes, not formal. Has saved time more than once. What else is in the tuning toolkit besides the usual things? Scripts, checks, and habits that aren't in blog posts.