Richie Lee has an update of XQueryPlanPath:
I’ve made a few changes to the XQueryPlanPath project. The project parses query plans into xml and then using xpath to find the value of one or more nodes. This could then be used in testing to verify that any changes made to a query would retain a query plan that is considered optimal, and then if any changes break the test you can verify if the change causes sub-optimal effect on your query.
There was however one issue – query plans are like opinions; every SQL Server Instance has one, and none of them think that theirs stinks. So running a test on a dev box will potentially produce a different query plan from that on the build server, to that of production etc. This broadly because of 3 reasons:
Check it out, especially if your XML parsing skills aren’t top-notch.