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Something’s Missing: Head Operators In Extended Event-Based Execution Plans

Grant Fritchey notices something odd about execution plans grabbed from an Extended Events session:

Notice anything missing? Yeah, the first operator, the SELECT operator (technically, not really an operator, but they don’t have any name or designation in the official documentation, so I’m calling them operators). It’s not there. Why do I care?

Because it’s where all the information about the plan itself is stored. Stuff like, Cached Plan Size, Compile Time, Optimizer Statistics Usage, Reason for Early Termination, is all there, properties and details about the plan itself. Now, the weird thing is, if you look to the XML, as shown here, all that data is available:

Read on for Grant’s best guess as to the root cause of the problem.