Missing Index Information and Query Stats

So the goal was to find a way to pull information from sys.dm_exec_query_stats so that we could identify poor performing procedures that were in cache at the moment and combine it with missing index information from sys.dm_db_missing_index_details. We’re combining these because we’re working with a Microsoft Dynamics CRM database that is almost all ad hoc queries and lots of them are against tables with missing indexes. The hope was to identify necessary indexes merely by looking at the longest running queries.

Unfortunately there is no way to combine data from the missing indexes set of DMV’s and all the execution DMV’s that show query stats, execution plan, etc. None of the missing index tables has a plan handle or a plan hash column that would allow you to combine that data with the query data to identify which queries would directly benefit from the index if it were created.

But, if you look at the query plans in sys.dm_exec_query_plan, you can see the missing index information there. What to do? XQuery.

Since the query_plan is stored as XML, simply writing a small XQuery exist() function will do the trick:

SELECT  TOP 10 *
FROM sys.dm_exec_query_stats s
   CROSS APPLY sys.dm_exec_query_plan(s.plan_handle) AS p
WHERE  p.query_plan.exist(
‘declare default element namespace “http://schemas.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2004/07/showplan”;
/ShowPlanXML/BatchSequence/Batch/Statements/StmtSimple/QueryPlan//MissingIndexes’) = 1
ORDER BY s.total_elapsed_time DESC

This is a pretty simple example, and yes, in reality you would not want to use SELECT *.  You would want to specify those columns that you were really interested in. Also, this allows you to get performance information from queries that show a MissingIndexes element in the XML of the showplan,  but I haven’t pulled the Missing Index data out and displayed it. That can be done, but I’ll leave it as homework for you for now (and because I’m still having a hard time with XQuery).

A quick nod to Tim Ford for the advice on the DMV’s. Please finish that book soon.

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