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Category: Query Store

Data Cleanup in Query Store

Published 2023-02-13 by Kevin Feasel

Grant Fritchey does some housekeeping:

The most important thing to understand here is that Query Store won’t just keep collecting data forever, filling your hard drive. There is a hard limit to how much data Query Store contains. By default, prior to 2019, that was 100mb. After 2019, it’s 1,000mb. You can, of course, adjust this up, or down, as needed on your systems. It’s a database-by-database setting (as so much of Query Store is). You can change this through SSMS:

Even with that limit, there are still several options available to you for when to clean up old Query Store data, whatever the definition of “old” (i.e., time-based or at the user’s whim).

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SQL Server 2022 Query Store Hints

Published 2022-12-01 by Kevin Feasel

Matthew McGiffen takes a hint:

Another neat little feature in SQL Server 2022 is Query Store Hints. This is the ability to apply a query hint through Query Store rather than having to modify existing code or fiddle around with plan guides.


Query hints are a way to influence optimizer behaviour towards generating desired execution plans for a given query. The word “hint” is a bit of a misnomer as usually they mandate what you wish to happen.

Right. They’re ‘hints’ in the way that my wife ‘hints’ that I should take out the garbage.

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SQL Server 2022: Forcing Optimized Plans

Published 2022-11-17 by Kevin Feasel

Matthew McGiffen wants you to put yourr wallet and your best plans in the bag:

I’ve been reading Bob Ward’s book “SQL Server 2022 Revealed” and one of the new features in Intelligent Query Processing (IQP) jumped out at me. Not because it’s going to rock my world but rather it reminded me of an idea I had when I first started playing with Query Store when it came out.

I thought it would be cool if the execution plans cached in Query Store could be used to populate the plan cache after an instance restart, removing the need for all queries to be recompiled. I even raised a suggestion on Microsoft Connect for it to be considered as a new feature.

Click through to see what Microsoft came up with along these lines.

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SQL Server: Learning from Query Store

Published 2022-11-03 by Kevin Feasel

Grant Fritchey explains a second-order effect of Query Store:

I may have occasionally talked about the importance of Query Store, but today I want to emphasize just how much Microsoft is weaponizing query store.

Of course, I don’t mean they’re creating the Death Star or something, I simply mean they’re taking the information that Query Store gathers and using that to enable a number of new performance enhancements within SQL Server.

Grant shows several examples of how SQL Server can take data in Query Store and use it to make queries in that database faster. It took a few versions of SQL Server but we’re getting to see some of the long-run promise of the feature, now that most of the bugs have been ironed out and the SQL Server development team has had enough time to implement this functionality.

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SQL Server 2022 Query Store Hints

Published 2022-09-09 by Kevin Feasel

David Pless takes us through some new query hints:

Query Store hints provide a direct method for developers and DBAs to shape query plans without changing application code.  

Query Store hints are a new feature that extends the power of Query Store—but this means that Query Store hints does require the Query Store feature to be enabled and that your query and query plan are captured in the Query Store.

Just like plan guides, Query Store hints are persisted and will survive restarts, but Query Store hints are much easier to use than plan guides.

Read on to see which options are available and how they work.

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When Query Store Plan Forcing Fails

Published 2022-08-02 by Kevin Feasel

Joe Billingham roots out failure:

Query Store is a fantastic feature of both SQL Server and Azure SQL DB. It allows you to monitor how queries execute against the database which is invaluable for troubleshooting performance issues. More than that though, it gives you the option to force an erratic query to use a particular execution plan, this helps avoid queries from running with inefficient plans and provides predictability and stability on the server.

But it does fail for various reasons and Joe has a list of them.

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Query Store in SQL Server 2022

Published 2022-06-29 by Kevin Feasel

Melody Zacharias gives us a heads up on what’s new with Query Store:

The SQL Server team has improved on Query Store for 2022 again and made some great improvements for SQL 2022. Query Performance was originally introduced as a flight recorder for your queries. It uses a system that gathers query performance data and gives you insights into your work loads over time. In 2022 it is being used to build and expand new capabilities in intelligent query processing.  To allow this to work well and be accurate, Query Store is now enabled by default for new databases. In addition to providing hinting support, it will facilitate the ability to build new intelligent query processing scenarios and improve performance.

Read on for a list of improvements you’ll see in the product.

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Query Store Hints in SQL Server 2022

Published 2022-06-17 by Kevin Feasel

Erik Darling has thoughts:

When you’re dealing with untouchable vendor code full of mistakes, ORM queries that God has turned away from, and other queries that for some reason can’t be tinkered with, we used to not have a lot of options.

In SQL Server 2022, Query Store gains a new super power: you can add hints to queries without intercepting the code in some other manner.

There are a couple of useful hints which won’t be available but Erik seems mostly upbeat about what is there.

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