Pedro Lopes announces an improvement to SQL Server execution plan results in 2017 CU3:
As I mentioned on yesterday’s post, with the recent release of SQL Server 2017 CU3, we released yet more showplan enhancements: you can see other posts related to showplan enhancements here.
In this article I’ll talk about the second showplan improvement we worked on, to assist in the discoverability of UDF usage impact on query execution.
The scenario is that if a query uses one or more user-defined scalar functions (such as T-SQL functions or CLR functions), a significant portion of query execution time may be spent inside those functions, depending on the function definition. And this may be not immediately obvious by looking at the query execution plan.
Recently, we added information on overall query CPU and elapsed time tracking for statistics showplan xml (both in ms), found in the root node of an actual plan (on which I blogged about here). We now added two new attributes: UdfCpuTime and UdfElapsedTime. These provide the total CPU and elapsed time (again, both in ms) that is spent inside all scalar user-defined functions, during the execution of a query.
I love it. UDFs have historically been silent query killers, as the execution plan would gleefully think that the function call is practically free because it’d only show a single iteration.