Microsoft SQL Server 2014 Unleashed

Plan Guide Best Practices

Following are some of the recommended best practices for using the USE PLAN query hint and the plan guides feature:

The USE PLAN query hint and plan guides should be used only when other standard query tuning options, such as tuning indexes and ensuring the table has current statistics, have been extensively tried and have failed to produce the necessary results. When a query plan is forced by using either the USE PLAN query hint or a plan guide, it prevents the Query Optimizer from adapting to changing data distributions, new indexes, or improved query execution algorithms in successive SQL Server releases or service ...