06Sep 2016 by Grant Fritchey 1 Comment

Query Store, Force Plan and “Better” Plans

SQL Server 2016, T-SQL
I am endlessly fascinated by how the Query Store works. I love teaching it at every opportunity too. Plus, almost every time I teach it, I get a new question about the behavior that makes me delve into the Query Store just a little bit more, enabling me to better understand how it works. I received just such a question at SQLSaturday Norway: If you are forcing a plan, and the physical structure changes such that a "better" plan is possible, what happens with plan forcing? Let's answer a different question first. What happens when the plan gets invalidated, when the index being used gets dropped or some other structural change occurs so that the plan is no longer valid? I answered that question in this blog post. The plan…
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15Aug 2016 by Grant Fritchey 5 Comments

Query Store, Force Plan and Dropped Objects

Azure, SQL Server 2016
I love the Query Store. Seriously. It’s a huge leap forward in the capabilities of Azure SQL Database and SQL Server in support of performance monitoring and query optimization. One of my favorite aspects of the Query Store is the ability to force plans. Frankly though, it’s also the scariest part of the Query Store. I do believe that plan forcing will be one of the most ill-used functions in SQL Server since the multi-statement table-valued user-defined function (don’t get me started). However, unlike the UDF, this ill-use will be because of poor understanding on the part of the user, not a fundamental design issue. No, plan forcing and the Query Store are very well constructed. Let me give you an example of just how well constructed they are. Let’s…
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