Monitoring performance of a query by SET SHOWPLAN_XML

SHOWPLAN_XML is an XML version of the estimated execution plan. It provides all the information in XML format which we used to get in graphical format in estimated execution plan, more details about information which is provided by XML execution plan is given in the How it works section of this recipe. XML execution plan is nothing more than one XML file, so it is really very easy to save for future reference or for comparing it with other execution plan. The XML Execution plan becomes even more useful in a shared database hosting environment, as in that case you don't have enough permissions on the server to determine the bottleneck.

Getting ready

I have already mentioned in the introduction section that the execution plan is the obvious first step when we start looking into any performance issue in the query. Many times, in a community portal, I have been asked a question regarding query performance tuning but in that case I neither...