The query optimizer is the single most important technology within the SQL Server relational engine. It decides how any given SQL statement is executed, which is shown in a query execution plan. However, the execution plan is only one of several important sources of information about how a query performs, and they're full of jargon and obscurely defined operations. But there's a solution to this problem!

SolarWinds Plan Explorer (PE), a 100% free product, enables DBAs and devs to easily read execution plans, and helping them write better-performing SQL code, all in a fraction of the time. Plus, troubleshooting existing SQL code becomes fast, easy, and a visually vibrant experience.

You'll start by learning to visualize, read, and understand execution plans, then explore all the ways PE reveals additional performance pitfalls and eases troubleshooting. Through a variety of demos, you'll see where PE immediately reveals an otherwise hard-to-detect problem, including difficult situations like parameter sniffing, deadlock troubleshooting, outdated stats detection, inaccurate memory grants, and heavy spools and spills. In addition, you'll learn about other powerful features like index what-if tuning, query history and comments, integrated wait stats, and statistics IO metrics, live query replay with resource consumption correlation, and much more.

When done with this session, you'll have solid knowledge for tuning and troubleshooting SQL queries, transactions, and stored procedures. Learn all the ways SolarWinds Plan Explorer helps in this demo-packed session!