What I do is design and program ETL processes. Large chunk of my time is spent writing Stored Procedures. I really don’t understand a lot about the query execution plan. I can pretty much do 3 things: 1) I can look for bottle necks (why is 90% of the resource usage on this one transaction?), 2) I can look for unexpected behavior (why is it doing a table scan instead of an index scan?), 3) I can compare two queries . Unfortunately, I don’t feel confident that I am even doing these 3 things right. Also, I can’t help but feel that there is much more information there that I just don’t know how to understand.
So, on to the questions. What is the execution plan good for? Do most people writing T-SQL make use of this? Where can I go to learn more? Is there a good book? A website?
Please don’t say to ask the DBA. The jr. DBA is essentially as knowledgeable as me. I asked the Sr. DBA and he said that he doesn’t really use it. The only person I know that uses it is the DBA at my previous company. We used to have a monthly technology brown bag lunch. I talked him into giving a class for one, but I changed jobs before he did.
Any thought or advice is appreciated!