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Category: Query Store

Query Store Plan Forcing: You Can’t Always Get What You Want

Published 2017-11-16 by Kevin Feasel

Kendra Little shows an example where trying to force a Query Store plan results in an oddity:

This is not considered a “failure”

When I check the Query Store DMVs, force_failure_count is 0. The last_force_failure_reason_desc is NONE.

Query Store didn’t fail to apply the narrow plan. Instead, it’s just deciding not to give it to me, now that I’ve forced that plan.

Seems kinda like an adolescent, doesn’t it?

The answer remains a bit of a mystery, but read on to see how Kendra troubleshoots this.

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Query Store And Availability Groups FAQ

Published 2017-11-08 by Kevin Feasel

Erin Stellato has a few follow-up questions from her Query Store sessions:

Q: Can you enable Query Store for a read-only replica?

A: No.  Because the replica is read-only, and Query Store inherently writes data TO the database, you cannot enable it to capture queries that are executed against that read-only copy.  I did create a Connect item for this request.  If this is of interest to you, please up-vote it: Enable Query Store for collection on a read-only replica in an Availability Group.  The more votes this has, the better the possibility that Microsoft will implement it, so feel free to share with your friends and have them vote too!

Read on for more questions and answers, and if you’re interested in it, vote on the Connect item above.

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Getting SQL Server Context Settings

Published 2017-11-01 by Kevin Feasel

Frank Gill has a script to find current Query Store context settings:

The following query will return the hex and integer value for each row in the table (NOTE: Query store must be enabled for the database to return values):

USE YourQueryStoreDatabase;

SELECT set_options, CONVERT(INT, set_options) AS IntSetOptions
FROM sys.query_context_settings;

The set_options value represents a bit mask, with each binary digit representing a specific set option. The full list of values can be found here. I created stored procedure ReturnSetOptions to take the IntSetOptions from the query above and return the set options represented. The code for the procedure is listed below.

Read on to get a script which breaks the bitmask field into human-readable results.

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Query Store Capture Modes

Published 2017-10-25 by Kevin Feasel

Arun Sirpal notes an important difference in the default Query Store settings for SQL Server 2017 versus Azure SQL Database:

So just remember the only difference when analyzing settings is the difference in Query Store Capture Mode. For Azure it is set to AUTO whereas with local installed SQL Servers it is set to ALL.

What does this mean? ALL means that it is set to capture all queries but AUTO means infrequent queries and queries with insignificant cost are ignored. Thresholds for execution count, compile and runtime duration are internally determined.

Read on to learn more, including how to change these settings.

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Forced Plans And Query Text

Published 2017-09-26 by Kevin Feasel

Erin Stellato warns us about changing objects with which we use Query Store’s forced plans:

There are different query_id values in sys.query_store_query, as well as different entries for each query in sys.query_store_query_text. Both queries are still tied to the stored procedure (object_id 1483152329) which can be confusing if you don’t understand what occurred. In order to confirm which query has executed most recently, you can use the query below, which joins both system views (replace the query_ids as appropriate)

This is a good thing to keep in mind if you perform formatting changes on procedures.

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Query Store And Backups

Published 2017-08-24 by Kevin Feasel

Kendra Little walks us through Query Store portability via database backups:

Query Store was designed to be clever, and to minimize its impact on your performance. Query Store only flushes its data from memory to disk periodically. You get to control this by setting the data flush interval in the Query Store settings for a database. (Read more about this in Microsoft Documentation here.)

The default value for Query Store data flush is 15 minutes. That means that in the case of a crash, you might lose up to around 15 minutes of activity.

Even if you’ve lowered this, you might want to make sure that a backup contains the very latest activity, particularly if you’re taking the backup to get Query Store data for someone to look at.

Read the whole thing.

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SQL Server 2017 Finds Plan Regressions

Published 2017-07-21 by Kevin Feasel

Jovan Popovic shows off some automatic tuning functionality in SQL Server 2017:

Plan change regression happens when SQL Database changes a plan for some T-SQL query, and the new plan has the worse performance than the previous one. SQL Server 2017 has Automatic Tuning feature that enables you to easily find plan change regressions and fix them. In this post you will see the demo script that you can use to cause plan change regression and manually fix it using new sys.dm_db_tuning_recommendations view.

If you are not familiar with plan regressions and new tuning recommendations in SQL Server 2017, I would recommend to read these two posts:

This would be enough to understand steps in this demo.

Our experience with plan regression recommendations has been uniformly positive so far.  Those tests have been in dev and QA environments, but so far, there hasn’t been a terrible recommendation.

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Wait Stats In Query Store

Published 2017-07-05 by Kevin Feasel

Andrejs Antjufejevs has great news if you’re using Query Store:

Starting today in Azure SQL Database and from CTP 2.0 of SQL Server 2017 wait stats per query are available in Query Store. Now you can exactly identify why and how much every plan waited for some resource. Information about wait times are persisted so you can also analyze through the history what was the problems and why queries waited for resources

This is a welcome improvement for query tuners on 2017.

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Open Query Store

Published 2017-06-30 by Kevin Feasel

William Durkin announces Open Query Store, a Query Store-like solution for pre-2016 SQL Server instances:

The first release was published at the end of June 2017 and provides a background collection of query execution statistics in a database of your choice. The v1.0 release supports SQL Server from 2008 to 2014 and all editions (Express, Standard, Enterprise). There is also a PowerShell installer for those that are so inclined, which will grab the code from GitHub and install OQS into a specified database.

There is also a custom report which can be installed in SSMS (2016 and 2017), which will display information that OQS has collected.

This is a really cool community solution if you’re stuck on an older version of SQL Server for a while.

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Multi-Database Query Store Data Retrieval

Published 2017-06-05 by Kevin Feasel

Tracy Boggiano wants to get Query Store data for a large number of databases on the same instance and has written a Powershell script to this effect:

In SQL Server 2016, Microsoft introduced to us the Query Store.  This has been proven to be a very beneficial feature especially at my job, saved the day on Christmas Eve. One of the limitations if see is when you have server with several databases on it trying to find the one that has the problem. So until Microsoft gives use a better tool or someone builds one I wrote a quick PowerShell function to query across all the databases and return data to a grid so you can sort and find that troublesome query.

To call it simply provide the server, which metric you want, the top number of queries to return, who many hours to look back, and the minimum execution count.

This is one of two issues I have with Query Store, the other being that its data gets saved to the primary filegroup without any recourse.  Click through for the script.

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