If you’ve read my past blogs, you’ll know that I believe SQL Sentry Plan Explorer is absolutely a must for assisting in execution plan review, tuning and troubleshooting. Recently, SQL Sentry went to the next level with the services offered in Plan Explorer. The next step was to provide an easily accessible feature to one of the best execution plan and optimizer minds I know in Paul White, but a community view for guidance in assisting with execution plan questions. The feature is built into Plan Explorer and allows you to upload an execution plan directly to SQLPerformance.com. This site offers Q & A, accompanied by a description of the plan and comments, and questions or inquiry of how the exact plan or operations are working.
I’m not going to run through actually performing an upload because Aaron Bertrand already has a detailed article over on SQLPerformance.com on how to upload and review your plans on the site. With Aaron’s article, I didn’t want to just rewrite something that is already perfectly outlined, as Aaron always does. What I do want to say is, the feature being handed out by SQL Sentry within Plan Explorer is extremely valuable in a lot of ways, but most of all, it shows the commitment SQL Sentry has for delivering a truly useful product and ensuring everyone has access to the assistance we need to truly result in the most optimal execution plan performance possible. This is an easy extension of resources that expands an individual’s or team’s ability to resolve and learn about the optimizer and how execution plans are created, work and can be manipulated.
If you haven’t downloaded Plan Explorer, give it a try. If you find yourself not wanting to work without it, give the Pro edition a try next. You won’t regret it. You also will have an extremely hard time working with execution plans in SSMS once you start using Plan Explorer Pro.
To read more about Plan Explorer and the Pro features
A Glance of Plan Explorer Pro’s Deadlock Analysis
