I’ve seen the question a few times now: “How do I compare two plans side-by-side in Plan Explorer?” Management Studio allows you to view multiple graphical plans that are visible simultaneously, either by generating plans for every statement in a batch, or by generating plans in separate query windows and then splitting the panes. However, at ...

For those of you using the SQL Server 2008 R2 version of Management Studio, and have applied Service Pack 1, you have probably noticed that clicking on a ShowPlan in grid results no longer shows the graphical plan, but rather opens a new window with the raw XML. For example, running the following query: SELECT TOP (5) ...

On Friday, we published a new version of our free query plan analysis tool, SQL Sentry Plan Explorer. As noted in the change list, we've added a couple of important features. SQL Server 2012 support With a whole slew of changes to the showplan schema in Denali, we've added operators and columns to reflect these changes. For example, you will ...

A couple of years ago, John Sansom wrote a blog post comparing the performance of two different ways to get the maximum value from a column: MAX() and TOP (1). http://www.johnsansom.com/performance-comparison-of-select-top-1-verses-max/ In the conclusion, he states:  When a clustered index is present on the table & ...

Plan Explorer is a free application from SQL Sentry, designed to make execution plan analysis faster and easier. It was developed in response to customer demand for deeper query analysis, but was originally intended only for the paid version of the software. When the team realized how useful the tool could actually be, they decided to give ...

Today we released a new build of SQL Sentry Plan Explorer. The build # is 6.2.34 and you can download it from the usual location. Plan Explorer Changes The updates in this release include the following: A new ''Check for Updates'' feature accessible via the Help menu: Other new additions to the Help menu: Enable/disable the ...