Using the Visual Explain White Board

The Visual Explain Whiteboard acts as a workspace for conveniently comparing multiple Execution Plans. When Execution Plans are enabled as part of Query Results, the node cost, input output cost, CPU cost, cardinality and bytes for that query are displayed under the Execution Plan tab of the Query Analyzer window. Color coding of each operation in the executed query from the Query Analyzer helps with performance analysis.

When multiple statements are separated by statement separaotrs such as "GO", each gets its execution plan pane. Right clicking on an execution plan allows that particular plan to be added to the Explain Plan Whiteboard. If the Explain Plan Whiteboard has been opened and closed, accessing Tools->Explain Whiteboard relaunches it with the contents last added to it.

When performance tuning SQL statements, it is often useful to execute a plan on a statement, locate performance bottlenecks, modify the statement and then execute a second plan. Each additional Execution Plan added to the whiteboard is added at the bottom of the scrolling window in a resizeable pane, providing a convenient history of the executions for comparison. Columns within the Whiteboard are sortable.

The Whiteboard can be cleared by clicking the "Clear Changes" button at the top left.