Analytics at the speed of business with Real-Time Intelligence with Brad Watts

Meeting IN-PERSON
Monday, September 10, 2025
Networking begins at 6:15PM
Speaker will begin 6:30
Location:
Improving Atlanta Offices
11675 Rainwater Dr #100
Alpharetta, GA 30009

# Execution Plans... Where do I start?

SQL (the language) is not a third generation language, where the developer tells the computer every step it needs to take. It is a declarative language that specifies the required results. SQL Server itself will figure out what steps it takes to get to those results. Most of the time, that works very well.
But sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes a query takes too much time. You need to find out why, so you can fix it. That’s where the execution plan comes in. In the execution plan, SQL Server exposes exactly which steps it took for your query, so you can see why it’s slow.
However, execution plans can be daunting to the uninitiated. Especially for complex queries. Where do you even start?
In this session you will learn how to obtain execution plans. and how to start reading and understanding them.

Bio
Hugo Kornelis is an established SQL Server community expert who spends a lot of time at various conferences. He is also a blogger, technical editor of a variety of books, and Pluralsight author. He was awarded SQL Server MVP and Data Platform MVP 17 times (2006 - 2016 / 2019 - now).

When not working for the community, he is busy at his day job: freelance database developer/consultant.

Hugo has over 25 years of SQL Server experience in various roles. Starting from a strong database design background, he has spent the last ten years specializing in execution plans and query performance tuning.

Target audience
Database developers and DBAs who understand that execution plans can be a good tool to improve query performance, but have no experience yet with this tool.
No prior knowledge of execution plans is required, but attendees are expected to understand indexes, and to be able to read and write basic and slightly advanced T-SQL queries.