It’s not enough to look at the longest running query. What if you have two queries, one runs for 5 minutes and the other runs for 5 seconds. Which do you tune? The first one, of course. But, let’s add a little information to our thought experiment. The one that runs for 5 minutes is called 2AM, your local time, when there are almost no users on the system and the one that runs for 5 seconds is called 40 times a minute all day long. Now, which one do you tune? That’s right, suddenly that 5 second query takes on a HUGE significance based on how often it’s called.

But how do you know how often a query is called? The easiest way to gather that information is not necessarily the best in terms of a long term methodology, a server side trace that captures RPC and SQL Batch completion events. The beauty of the server side trace is how easy it is to set up and how much information you can gather, so quickly. You can immediately start getting every query run on the server along with how long they took to run, how much CPU each used and various other metrics. You can run this for short periods or long and then gather the data together into a table in a database and run aggregation queries against it to generate reports showing the most frequently called query. Simple, quick easy. But there are a couple of problems with it. First, while you can run it 24×7, you’re going to see quite a bit of data generated from the events, depending on the load on your system, of course. Second, the queries that come through will likely have all kinds of stuff associated with them, various paramter values and what not, that will make aggregation hard. You’ll have to put together a means of cleaning the data and maintaining it or purchase one of the many third party tools for doing this. You’ll have to store and manage large amounts of data as it comes into the system. It’s going to be a lot of work.

Another option, one that will require a degree of setup, is a little less accurate, it’s unlikely to capture every single execution of every single query, but it will get the majority, sys.dm_exec_query_stats. This handy little dynamic management view carries aggregate data about all the queries currently in the cache. It will show how much accumulated processing time a query has taken, the last time, the longest time, the shortest time and lots of other information, but the one interesting value we would be most interested in here, is the usage count. If you just run a SELECT statement against sys.dm_exec_query_stats, you’ll get interesting data back, but you won’t see your query or your execution plan. To make the information available within the DMV, you’ll need to combine it with other DMV’s. Here’s a sample query that pulls back information that could be useful for identifying badly performing queries on your system including how often they’re called.

SELECT dest.text
,deqp.query_plan
,deqs.execution_count
,deqs.creation_date
,deqs.query_hash
,deqs.query_plan_hash
,deqs.total_elapsed_time
,deqs.total_clr_time
,deqs.total_physical_reads
,deqs.total_worker_time
FROM sys.dm_exec_query_stats deqs
CROSS APPLY ( SELECT *
           FROM sys.dm_exec_sql_text(deqs.sql_handle)) dest
CROSS APPLY ( SELECT *
           FROM sys.dm_exec_query_plan(deqs.plan_handle)) deqp

There’s a lot you could do with this query, but the real power is going to come from gathering this data on a regular basis. It’s going to depend on how volatile the cache is on your system. If most of your queries sit in the cache for weeks (and that’s possible), then you could run a query once a week to gather the information. If your cache is getting flushed clean once an hour, you’d need to run this query more often. Regardless of how often you run the query, understand that, because you’re dependent on the cache, it is possible to miss data. Once you get the query running on your system, you can use the information to determine which of the queries needs to be tuned, not just on how long it runs, but also how often it runs, or even using other combinations of the information returned.

One other point, you may see ad hoc queries on your system. Here’s a simple example:

SELECT TOP (5) sod.*
FROM Sales.SalesOrderDetail sod
WHERE sod.ProductID = 772
ORDER BY sod.SalesOrderID ASC ;

If the value passed to sod.ProductID is changed to 773 or any other value, you will get a different entry in cache for this procedure. That’s where you can put the query_hash or the query_plan_hash values to work. These values show a hash that SQL Server creates for each query that it stores in cache. You could group by these values to aggregate ad hoc queries that would, if they were stored procedures, be identical executions and arrive at an aggregated count.

So, if you need precise information, you can use trace events, but, pay for that with a lot of data that you have to manage.