plan explorer

I attended a great session September 15th 2011 at the Triad SQL PASS User Group with Jason Hall from SQL Sentry demonstrating the advantages of SQL Sentry’s Plan Explorer over the built-in SSMS plan explorer.  You can find Jason under @SQLSaurus on Twitter. The meeting was hosted by Dynamic Quest, and everyone’s favorite pizza and soda was served before the meeting started at 6:30pm.

Jason went through 7 example queries to show how the SQL Sentry Plan Explorer reporting results compared to SSMS.  Sentry’s product is free and integrates directly into SSMS.  Here are some other advantages with Sentry’s Plan Explorer:

• Features color scaling from yellow to red so you can easily identify problem areas.
• Features separate I/O and CPU costs to identify disk vs processor intense queries.
• The plan viewer is must more condensed than SSMS’s view.  This enables you to see the whole plan much easier.