This Friday is the last of my summer seminars. On August 27, I am presenting on plan caching, plan reuse and recompile and plan cache metadata. This is one of my favorite topics to talk about, because a lot of the information is not very widely known, and you can have a tremendous performance impact by making sure when plans are reused when that ...

Give us easier to read execution plansMichelle Ufford (@SQLFool) recently asked for help pinpointing the most expensive node(s) in a complicated execution plan.  Mladen Prajdic (@MladenPrajdic) has a useful workaround; he coded up a quick query to parse the showplan XML and order results by cost descending.  The Connect item that would ...

  I just today found out about something that was in plain sight in the Books Online... but the documentation is so vast, I haven't discovered everything yet. I blogged about clearing a single plan from cache in SQL Server 2005 a while back, and mentioned a rumor that there would be a new way to do this in SQL Server 2008. And then just ...

I've been running some tests with the new SQL Server 2008 configuration option 'optimize for ad hoc workloads' which is intended to reduce cache bloat due to holding onto plans for single use ad hoc queries. This option will allow a new type of cached object to be stored, which isn't the only plan, but merely a stub. There will be a corresponding ...