Rob Farley exlaims his appreciation of Live Query Stats in SQL Server Management Studio:
I wrote about Live Query Statistics within SSMS a while back – and even presented at conferences about how useful it is for understanding how queries run…
…but what I love is that at customers where I have long-running queries to deal with, I can keep an eye on the queries as they execute. I can see how the Actuals are forming, and quickly notice whether the iterations in a Nested Loop are going to be unreasonable, or whether I’m happy enough with things. I don’t always want to spend time tuning a once-off query, but if I run it with LQS turned on, I can easily notice if it’s going to be ages before I see any rows back, see any blocking operators that are going to frustrate me, and so on.
I don’t use it often, but when I do, I typically learn something interesting about the query I’m running.