Viewing Query Plans

This is more of a reminder to myself. I can’t always remember the commands to show the execution plan in text. It’s nice having the graphical interface but when you have a big execution plan then seeing it in text is much easier. Here are the commands:

– simple estimated execution plan

set showplan_text on

GO

–*** estimated execution plan with more detail. best to use this ****

set showplan_all on

GO

– actual execution plan. runs the query. so it’s better to use showplan_all for a big query 

set statistics profile on

GO

More detail here