September 2013

One Year Later

Wow!  It’s been one year since I launched my blog, and my how things have changed. Accomplishments Over the Past Year I’ve had a chance to interact with a lot of people relating to many of the posts on my blog, and even run into a few people that said “Hey I know you through your blog”. I’ve gotten much more involved in the #sqlfamily through Twitter, Stackexchange, as well as through my local SQL Server user group. Although I’ve attended meetings at my local group off and on over the past several years, I am now making a specific...

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The Case of the NULL Query_Plan

As a DBA, we’re often asked to troubleshoot performance issues for stored procedures.  One of the most common tools at our disposal is the query execution plan cached in memory by SQL Server. Once we have the query plan, we can dissect what SQL Server is doing and hopefully find some places for improvement. Grabbing the actual XML query plan for a stored procedure from the cache is fairly easy using the following query. From this point, we can open the XML query plan in Management Studio or Plan Explorer to start our investigation. But what happens if SQL Server...

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