Donnie Carvajal (8/1/2013)
Thanks for the quick responses. What is a .sqlplan? Is it the estimated execution plan from ssms?
both the estimated execution plan and the actual execution plan can be right clicked and saved as a .sqlplan, which is just an xml file with a custom extension.
The ACTUAL execution plan is much more valuable(it contains the estimates too!); estimates can be guess-timates, and the actual execution plan shows the differences between the estimated and actual...an example might be the estimate expected 10 rows, but the actual execution ended up getting a million rows due to bad statistics or something.
Lowell