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) ...

I got a couple of really great questions during my SSWUG Workshop this morning, as I was discussing seeks and scans, and since the answers to the two questions are very related, I decided to address both of them in more detail in this blog post. Most people think about a seek operation as retrieving just one or a few rows, and a scan as ...

It's time for the eighth T-SQL Tuesday, managed this time by Robert Davis at SQL Server Central. This time, the topic was announced very late, and I was just starting to write a blog post of my own when I saw it. Fortunately, my topic easily fits into this month's topic of ''Gettin' Schooled'', which is supposed to have something to do with either ...

I know, I haven't made a geeky post in a while... but I promise that I'll do one after this seminar. I'll take some of the best questions that I get during the chat and write them up here. Query Plans Workshop (June 30, 2010) Learn about basic elements, tools for exploring your query plans, how to detect inefficient plans and best practice ...