Monday, June 15, 2026
HomeData Modelling & AIA few quick fixes for Plan Explorer

A few quick fixes for Plan Explorer

I’m happy to announce a new release for Plan Explorer, build 11.0.116 (download). This consists of four updates to fix a few minor issues:

SSMS v17 Add-In

We’ve received a lot of questions about supporting the latest version of Management Studio, which has been completely decoupled from the database engine. This new version is now supported by the Plan Explorer add-in; however, you’ll have to restart SSMS after updating Plan Explorer in order to see the change.

Cleaner Tooltips

Initially, we put the query text onto the operator tooltip, but this could cause problems for longer queries – pushing things like sort and spill warnings off the tooltip. We’ve removed the query here to avoid this issue and also because it’s redundant – it’s in the Statement grid, the Text Data pane, and usually on the Command Text tab as well.

SQL Server 2017 DOM support

Previously, if you tried to run multiple batches against a SQL Server 2017 instance, you might have seen a syntax error parsing the keyword GO. This was because of a mismatch in the DOM version between Plan Explorer and the database engine, and has now been resolved. We still have some work to do in order to support plans that contain new operators, like Adaptive Join, and some other version-specific showplan additions.

Toolbar Cleanup

We’ve started thinking about some new functionality on the toolbar, and the first step was making some room. The Anonymize button has been removed, partly because it’s in a menu as well, and partly because most of the people who have used this option didn’t really need to anonymize anything.

Aaron (@AaronBertrand) is a Data Platform MVP with industry experience dating back to Classic ASP and SQL Server 6.5. He is editor-in-chief of the performance-related blog, SQLPerformance.com.

Aaron’s blog focuses on T-SQL bad habits and best practices, as well as coverage of updates and new features in Plan Explorer, SentryOne, and SQL Server.

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