Using Live Query Statistics

To meet the need to analyze a query execution plan while the query is executing, Live Query Statistics (LQS) was introduced with the SQL Server 2016 release of SSMS, adding rich visuals by animating the in-flight execution plan to allow more immediate and precise identification of hot spots in a plan during query execution.

To see LQS in action, open a new query window in SSMS, in which we can use the following example query from Chapter 2, Mechanics of the Query Optimizer. This could be a previously identified long-running query that was created to troubleshoot and tune:

SELECT e.[BusinessEntityID], p.[Title], p.[FirstName],
     p.[MiddleName], p.[LastName], p.[Suffix], e.[JobTitle],
     pp.[PhoneNumber], pnt.[Name] AS [PhoneNumberType],
     ea.[EmailAddress], p.[EmailPromotion], a.[AddressLine1],
     a.[AddressLine2], a.[City], sp.[Name] AS [StateProvinceName...