Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Performance Tuning Cookbook

Implementing a fixed execution plan using SQL plan guide

As plan guides can be used to specify query hints for SQL statements, they can also specify an execution plan instead of query hints to force an execution plan.

In this recipe, we first observe that even though there is a non-clustered index on ProductID column, some of the values of ProductID cause an index scan operation when data is retrieved. We will create an SQL plan guide so that all the queries as specified by the plan guide performs the index seek operation for every ProductID by forcing a previously saved execution plan.

Getting ready

We will see that ProductID 806 causes an index seek operation while ProductID 800 causes an index scan operation. We will generate an execution plan ...