Free eBook “SQL Server Execution Plans” by Grant Fritchey. Execution plans show you what’s going on behind the scenes in SQL Server. They can provide you with a wealth of information on how your queries are being executed by SQL Server. Grant Fritchey’s book is the only in-depth look at how to improve your SQL query performance through careful design of execution plans.
Book Description
Execution plans show you what’s going on behind the scenes in SQL Server. They can provide you with a wealth of information on how your queries are being executed by SQL Server, including:
- Which indexes are getting used and where no indexes are being used at all.
- How the data is being retrieved, and joined, from the tables defined in your query.
- How aggregations in GROUP BY queries are put together.
- The anticipated load, and the estimated cost, that all these operations place upon the system.
All this information makes the execution plan a fairly important tool in the tool belt of database administrator, database developers, report writers, developers, and pretty much anyone who writes TSQL to access data in a SQL Server database.
Given the utility and importance of the tool, you’d think there’d be huge swathes of information devoted to this subject. To be sure, fantastic information is available from various sources, but there really isn’t any one place you can go to for focused, practical information on how to use and interpret execution plans.
This is where my book comes in. My goal was to gather as much useful information on execution plans as possible into a single location, and to organize it in such as way that it provided a clear route through the subject, right from the basics of capturing plans, through their interpretation, and then on to how to use them to understand how you might optimize your SQL queries, improve your indexing strategy, and so on.
Table of Contents
- Execution Plan Basics
- Reading Graphical Execution Plans for Basic Queries
- Text and XML Execution Plans for Basic Queries
- Understanding More Complex Query Plans
- Controlling Execution Plans with Hints
- Cursor Operations
- XML in Execution Plans
- Advanced Topics