Tool for comparison of SQL Server query plans? [closed]

Question

Does anyone know of a tool that can be used to compare (relatively complex) query plans? I'm not looking for a guide to query plans, but just a tool that enables me to quickly see e.g. the different index use.

EDIT: just to make it clear, I'm not looking for information about the plan, but a tool that can quickly point out the differences between two plans (I know, I could do that myself, but the size of the plan(s) make that difficult).

Answer 1

I'm not aware of a ready-made tool for this, just if you use SET SHOWPLAN_XML ON to get the plans in XML format you can pretty-format them in Visual Studio, and then compare with your favourite text comparison tool.

And you can also right click on the plan in SSMS and choose Save Execution Plan as... to save to a file.

Answer 2

There is a tool called PICASSO - http://dsl.serc.iisc.ernet.in/projects/PICASSO/index.html which has an option to compare 2 query plans, provided the queries are the same but with different selectivities.

The to generate the plan differences can be used in your case as it is freely available.

Answer 3

I find that SQL Sentry Plan Explorer (free) is a useful tool analyzing queries, and also comparing them, as highlighted in this blog post.