If you are as obsessed with execution plans as I am, you must be familiar with this page in Books Online: Showplan Logical and Physical Operators Reference. I must admit that I have mixed feelings about it. My problem with this page is the confusing way in which it mixes physical operators, logical operations (called logical operators on that page to add to the confusion), and operators that only exist in intermediate phases of query optimization and that we will never see in actual execution plans. But I do like it for presenting all operators that exist, with a short…

Back in 2009, Adam Machanic (b|t) started an initiative that is still going strong: T-SQL Tuesday. This is a monthly blog party. Every second Tuesday of each month, lots of people blog about the same topic, selected by the host for that month. And now, in the 99th installment, I decided to finally join in! The April 2018 edition is hosted by Jens Vestergaard (b|t). His challenge for this month: write about the tools, other than SSMS and VSDT, that we use for our work. Essential tools The full invitation even includes words such as “essential” tools, and “depend on…

The monthly blog party that is known as T-SQL Tuesday has hit 100th episode (and I only missed 98 of them!). In true Olympic fashion, it returns to its roots for its centennial celebration. In other words, our host this month is Adam Machanic (b|t) himself. And even though 100 is a perfectly valid number to look back, he decided that looking ahead is more fun. He asks all bloggers to whip out the crystal ball and predict what our world will look like in another 100 months, when (hopefully) T-SQL Tuesday #200 will be celebrated. Looking ahead I must…

When I am tuning a query, I usually start with the query text. I execute it to retrieve an execution plan, and then the fun starts. However, very often I first need to find the specific query (or queries) to tune. There are multiple ways to do this, depending on what monitoring tools and which version of SQL Server the customer uses. In some cases, I at first find only an execution plan. Now I do like to see execution plans when tuning, but I also need to have the query! The old method So here is an example of…

I recently received an email from a reader of this blog. Specifically of the plansplaining posts. He wrote that he enjoyed reading it, but he still had some questions. Those questions made me realize that I made a mistake when I started this series. I dove in at the deep end. I assumed a lot of prior knowledge and experience with reading execution plans, but not every reader has that knowledge and that experience. So I decided that for this one post, I will move from the deep end of the pool to the shallow water. In this post I…

Back in 2009, Adam Machanic (b|t) started an initiative that is still going strong: T-SQL Tuesday. This is a monthly blog party. Every second Tuesday of each month, lots of people blog about the same topic, selected by the host for that month. And now, in the 99th installment, I decided to finally join in! For February 2018, our host Aaron Bertrand (b|t) has elected to give bloggers a choice: either share some of the non-tech things that we are passionate about; or go all Aaron-style and tell the world what we consider the worst T-SQL habits that we really…