You Can’t Trust “Edit Query Text” in SSMS’s Execution Plans.

When there are IF branches or conditional logic, “Edit Query Text” only shows you the branches that actually executed. It’s easy to miss whole swaths of code that didn’t happen to execute one particular time.

Parameter Sensitive Plan Optimization in SQL Server 2022

Learn about a new feature of SQL Server 2022 - Parameter Sensitive Plan Optimization(PSPO)

Execution Plan Operators

Plansplaining, part 20. SQL Graph (part 1)

Welcome to part twenty of the plansplaining series. It has been a long time since I last wrote a plansplaining post, partly because of my health, but also for a large part because I was out of ideas. But recently I decided to dig a bit deeper into a feature that was released in SQL Server 2017 and that I had so far not played with: SQL Graph.

Explore Natively Compiled SQL Server Stored Procedure Execution Plans

In this article, we look at execution plans and performance of a natively compiled stored procedure versus a traditional stored procedure.

Estimated and Actual Plans Can Have Different Shapes.

Hi Brent, What is your take on Hugo Kornelis’s explanation of execution plan naming. As her his explanation, estimated exec plan is simply an execution plan whereas actual execution plan = execution plan+run-time stats. Do you agree that the naming is flawed and confusing? – Yourbiggestfan

The Plan Cache Plan

How to Find the Estimation Cost for a Query

Discover how to estimate the cost of a query. Read on to see an example of how to extract the Estimated Cost for execution plans stored in the procedure cache.

Execution Plan Types

Query Optimization Level