From the course: SQL Server Performance for Developers

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Execution plan XMLs

Execution plan XMLs - SQL Server Tutorial

From the course: SQL Server Performance for Developers

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Execution plan XMLs

- [Instructor] We've talked about how you can view the execution plan and understand the operations that are going on by looking at the graphical plan. However, like we mentioned in the slide deck, execution plans are stored as XML within the database. SQL Server Management Studio gives us a way to look at that XML. So if we right click here within the execution plan and say show execution plan XML, I get to see this execution plan. And this kind of looks like a bunch of gibberish unless you know what you're looking at, but there's a lot of important information in here that can make it worth looking at, particularly for plans that you're having trouble troubleshooting the performance issues. I just want to highlight a couple of things, starting on line six. Here we see statement optimization level equals full. And what that means is SQL Server did a full optimization, generating several plans. SQL Server will also do trivial optimization for plans it doesn't feel require the full…

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