11.2 What Do Query Execution Plans Look Like? 201
and communicated back to the calling application through a communication process,
such as TCP/IP. Unbelievably, for short online transaction processing (OLTP) transac-
tions this entire process can execute in fractions of a second.
11.2 What Do Query Execution Plans Look Like?
Each vendor has its own proprietary format for visualizing query execution plans and the
specific information these include. However, although the details vary, the basic theme is
the same. The query execution plan for a query is shown as a directed graph, with both the
database objects and the operators of the query execution plans shown as nodes with the
graph. Objects will include tables, indexes, materialized views, catalogs, ...