How to save a Query Execution plan?

One has to save the query plan after interpreting the plan produced by the query. SQL Server Management Studio has an extension of “.sqlplan” for saving the plan in the system.

Steps to save an execution plan:

1. Go to the plan window and right-click.
2. Click on ‘Save Execution Plan As’.
3. Click on the folder or location where you want to save the execution plan, then give the name to the plan and click on ‘Save’.

A query execution plan (also known as a query plan) is a sequence of steps used by a relational database management system (RDBMS) to access data efficiently when executing a query. The query plan is also referred to as the SQL Server execution plan.

The query optimizer generates the SQL Server execution plan or query plan. Its goal is to generate an optimal economic query plan. Multiple execution plans are generated by the query processing engine after query execution, and from those generated execution plans, a plan with the best performance is selected.

The execution plans are stored in the plan cache memory location, from where they can be reused. Execution plans are available in 3 forms in the SQL server: XML plans, Graphical plans, and Text plans.

Here, we will learn all about Query-Execution Plans in SQL, understand the types of query execution plans, how to create query plans, and at last how to save query plans in SQL Server.