Tips, Tricks, and Advice from the SQL Server Query Processing Team

Intro to Query Execution Bitmap Filters

One of the least understood Query Execution operators is the Bitmap . I'd like to give a fairly brief overview of how Bitmap filters are used, as well as some technical details about their limitations and functionality. Bitmap filters are often mistaken

Statistics Profile Output Formatting

Statistics profile output is an important tool when it comes to troubleshooting query plan issues. When enabled, it returns a textual representation of the query plan with a lot of detail about cost and cardinality estimates as well as actual counts.

Showplan Trace Events

Besides SSMS, another great tool available to database developers and DBAs to view query plans and troubleshoot query compilation or execution issues is the SQL Server Profiler. In the Profiler, all the showplan events are listed under the Performance

What's this cost?

Oftentimes when people include actual execution plan (Ctrl-M, see previous posts for a good primer on execution plans) while executing a batch in SQL Server Management Studio, and they see this "Query cost (relative to the batch)" thing on top of each query in the batch, they start to ask: What does this mean? But when I run this batch, the first query runs a faster than the second, and yet this crazy SQL Server says the second has a higher cost, what are they talking about?

Viewing and Interpreting XML Showplans

As mentioned in our previous blog posting, SQL Server 2005 supports Showplan generation in XML format. XML-based Showplans provide greater flexibility in viewing query plans and saving them to files as compared to legacy Showplans. In addition to the