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 ...

This month's T-SQL Tuesday is being hosted by Allen White (@SQLRunr) and is about sharing your T-SQL tips and tricks. Since I know many people will share their T-SQL magic and wizardry, I thought I would share a couple of productivity tips - so still T-SQL related, but more how to take advantage of some features in SSMS. Drag column list onto ...

Where is my graphical ShowPlan? Many of you on SQL Server 2008 R2 are experiencing a major annoyance with SSMS since installing service pack 1 - when clicking a plan from grid results, you get raw XML instead of the graphical plan. I wrote about this symptom and a workaround in a previous post. In the original Connect item, they state that it ...

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 ...

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 ...

I have two little boys at home, and my parents were both teachers. It gives me a strange relationship with our public schools – I am passionate about them, and the quality of education I want for my kids, but I have to keep my distance a little, lest they drive me completely around the bend. One reason it’s so frustrating: among all the complex ...

This question came up on twitter, and I thought a quick blog post would be better than a series of 140-character snippets. Management Studio does not do the best job at highlighting missing indexes. If you have a simple query plan that represents a single statement, no problem; however, if you have a plan that represents a multi-batch statement, ...

This week I reported a few bugs - one with sp_helptext, one with Activity Monitor in Management Studio, and one in the new sys.dm_server_services DMV.#683234 : sp_helptext treats non-system objects as system objects For this one there is at least one weird case where running sp_helptext against on object prefixed with dbo ignores the dbo and tries ...

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 ...