Microsoft® SQL Server 2012 Unleashed

Using Plan Guides

At times, you might find it necessary to use query hints to improve the performance of queries for a particular query or a small set of queries. Although this may be easy to do when you have access to the application code, often the particular queries to be modified are embedded within a third-party application, and alteration of the queries themselves is virtually impossible. Also, if you start hard-coding query hints in your application code, changing them as necessary when data volumes change or when upgrading to a new version of SQL Server can be a difficult undertaking.

The plan guides feature in SQL Server 2012 provides an ideal solution for such scenarios by offering another mechanism for injecting query hints into the ...