Free SQL Server Query Plan Analysis In Your Browser

Erik Darling here with Darling Data, and continuing in my builder phase of life, you know, at least until the robots get too expensive. I’ve decided, I mean, if you’ve been, you know, dealing with me in any way, shape, or form over the past couple months, you’ll know that I’m working on two free open source tools. One of them is a full SQL Server performance monitor, and the other is sort of a portable query plan analyzer. I’ve taken it a step further, because some people seem allergic to downloading and trying things, and I’ve put the query plan, the free query plan analysis, right in your browser. Ta-da! I mean, this isn’t it. I’ll get to it in a minute. First, you have to listen to me talk about other things. Like, maybe you’re like, wow, Erik, all this free stuff, you must kind of know what you’re doing with the database. Maybe we should hire you for consulting, or maybe we should learn from you. There are links where you can do that down in the video description. It doesn’t hurt to click on them. No executable required. You can also, for as little, for as few, for as tiny little breadcrumb of $4 a month, become a supporting member of this channel.

Be real groovy, groovy-goolies. You can ask me office hours questions for free. I mean, at some point, I might have to start charging a quarter for those, but we’ll see how the economy picks up. And of course, if you, something else you can do for free, if you enjoy this content, and you enjoy the things that I do in my life, you can like, subscribe, and tell a friend, so that you get notified when I do other things, and your friends get notified when I do things, and then everyone gets happier together, I think. Speaking of which, pre-SQL Server performance monitoring. Gratis, or gratis, or whatever, however you say it. I don’t know. I can’t do voices.

You know, I tried a Christopher Walken like 15 years ago, and I just learned my lesson. Yeah, again, no voices. Totally free. Totally open source. No email, no phone home, nothing like that. It’s just all the stuff that a monitoring tool should monitor. A modern monitoring tool should monitor in SQL Server. You know, all the important stuff when you need to troubleshoot a performance issue. And of course, if you want to stay really, really modern, I’ve got built-in MCP servers, where you can just point them at your performance data collected over time, and space, and any other measurement you want to throw in there.

And you can have the robots go through your performance data, find problems, surface things, tell you about stuff, and you don’t have to lift a finger, aside from to say, you know, go look at this thing, right? Send them off to war, right? Anyway. Anyway. Again, happy surprise pre-con day. I will be in Jacksonville, Florida. Maybe it’s warm there, finally, because New York is still not warm. It is. What day is it? April something, and it is still cold here. I’m angry about that. So I’m happy that I’m going to Florida, where I’ll probably wear shorts. Not in front of a crowd, but I might wear shorts independently on my own. Anyway.

It’s a vibe, you know? Other places I’ll be, where it will hopefully also be warm by the time I get there. Chicago, Illinois. Dubious. May 7th and 8th. Not sure about warmth. SQL day Poland. May 11th and 13th. I don’t know. Poland sort of has a reputation for being cold.

I’ve only ever seen it in war movies, where I think it was supposed to look bad, so I’m going to just try to be optimistic about Poland being warm by then. Data Saturday, Croatia. June 12th and 13th. I’ve got to imagine that anything in that area of the world by June, I might be sweating by then. And then back to shivering at past Data Summit. New Community Summit. Date in Seattle. November 11th through 13th. 11th. 9th through 11th.

There are so many other 11th on there, I get confused. Anyway. Let’s talk about free query plan analysis right in your browser. Now this is not an advertisement for Microsoft Edge. Because I hate Bing and this browser is honestly, and it’s fine if you’re into that sort of thing. But if you go to plans.erikdarling.com, that is a brand spanking new subdomain under my website, under the Darling Data umbrella of websites, which is really just erikdarling.com, you will find this lovely interface.

And under that interface, you can either paste in plan.xml or you can upload a plan file. Now, I know what you’re thinking to yourself. There’s already a paste the plan. Yes, there is. But there’s a slight difference here. This one actually analyzes your query plans, and it does not, by default, save your query plans. All of the analysis is done in your browser.

It does not leave your browser. It does not go out into the world. There’s no plan file saved anywhere. You can do that, but you don’t have to do that. So, if you go to choose file, I’m just going to choose a query plan that I have saved immediately here.

You get back information about your query that looks a bit like you would get from the Performance Studio application that I’m building. Up here, when we look at this stuff, we can see some runtime stats about the query, right? We can see, well, oh gosh, golly and gosh, there was a missing index and no parameters were passed in.

We have this lovely graph down here of the wait stats, right? So, we can see, like, sort of graphed out what our query waited on. We don’t have to go digging through plan XML anymore. And then, down in this section below, we will have all the warnings generated by our query plan things that you should probably pay attention to, right?

If you look through this stuff, that’s all critical warning, yada, yada. And, of course, we get back our, well, there’s also the query text in there, but then we get back a lovely graphical representation of our query plan, right? Just like in Performance Studio, right? Stuff over here, look at all this good stuff.

And then, down at the bottom, we have the full text analysis, just like you have in Performance Studio, where I break down everything in a way that a human can hopefully understand. So, if you ever want an opinion on a query plan, and you are not allowed to maybe share it publicly on a site like StackExchange or StackOverflow, or maybe you’re not allowed to paste the plan somewhere where that plan is going to get saved off somewhere, then that’s one thing you can do.

There are also a couple other things in here that are neat. There are two buttons up at the top. One of them is to export HTML.

So, if you want to save off, like, all the HTML from here, you can do that. See, we open that up, and it looks just like it did. Well, I mean, this part’s a little bit different, because I don’t want to, like, export images to you.

But this part, so we have, like, the operator tree from here, and we have all the full text and everything else down there. So, if you want to share your plan, you can hit this button that says share. And when you hit this button that says share, you will be able to choose how long that plan stays saved on my little server for.

It is a secure server. I have done my best to make it unhackable. I’m not saying it’s unhackable.

I’m not challenging anyone in the world. I’m just saying I have taken reasonable precautions against anyone breaking in there. And it will say, you can do this, and you can have it expire after anywhere between one day and one year. And if you hit continue, it will say, are you sure?

You’re okay with this, right? Like, if you click twice, it’s not an accident. All right?

I’m just saying, like, once, oops, twice, that’s on you. But even if you’re like, I got confused, there’s a button up here where you can immediately delete it, right? If you say, ah, I was confused and drunk.

I was off my keister that day. I didn’t mean to put that there. You can, if you’re like, I just messed up, you can immediately delete it, and it goes away, right? And that URL, just the file is gone.

But then if you want to, but if you actually want to share it, then you will get this URL that you can share this plan with whoever you want, with all the analysis baked in, so that you don’t get, I don’t know, you don’t have to, like, explain anything. All the explanation is here. And you can say, how do I fix it?

What do I do? What did I do wrong? How did I end up in this place? How did I end up so doomed and damned with this query plan? And someone else can read it and look at it and say, here’s what I do. You can, you can even ask me, but that, that, that costs, if you want to do that, that’s this consulting link over here.

And that’s where you can, you can, you can get help with your SQL Server from, from me, right? Or with your query plans from me. That’s, that, that, that part is not free, unfortunately.

I cannot, cannot dedicate that much time. But this stuff I’m happy to do and to help people out, right? All right. Anyway, free query plan analysis, right in your browser, doesn’t leave your browser.

Sharing is optional, storing it is optional, and you get to choose how long you want to store it for, right? So you can even, you can even like share it with someone. And as soon as they get it, you can immediately delete the link.

Or if you, you’re uncomfortable with that, you can just export the HTML yourself and just share that with someone. So it doesn’t live on the internet, right? I don’t see anything from this, right? There’s nothing here that I get out of this.

All right. Anyway, thank you for watching. I hope you enjoyed yourselves. I hope you learned something. I hope you will, you will, you will start getting some free query plan analysis right in your browser. All right.

Thank you for watching.