I was presenting on execution plans when another question came up that I didn’t know the answer to immediately. Yes, I know you’ve seen that phrase before on this blog. I love presenting because you get exactly the kinds of questions that make you think and make you learn. I’m presenting, in part, to learn, just as much as I am to teach. It was the same with kenpo. The more I taught, the better I learned the art. Wait, this isn’t supposed to be a blog post about learning. This one is about statistics.

The question was, does the execution plan have the statistics that were used by the optimizer to decide on the execution plan. And no, what was meant, was not does it show the estimated rows, which come from the statistics, but specifically does it show that it used a set of statistics named X? The answer to that is yes & no. Or, to be more DBAish about it, it depends.

Let’s take a really simple query run against a freshly installed copy of AdventureWorks2008R2:

SELECT p.BusinessEntityID,
p.FirstName
FROM Person.Person AS p
WHERE p.FirstName LIKE 'Toni%';

This query generates this execution plan:

Yes, a very sophisticated and hard to understand execution plan. Now, here’s the deal, there were two sets of statistics used to make this plan, but only one of them can be seen in the plan. See any statistics there? Sure you do. IX_Person_LastName_FirstName_MiddleName. That is one of the two sets of statistics that were used to make this execution plan. Where’s the second set? Not in the execution plan.

[sourcecode language=”sql”]sp_helpstats N’Person.Person’, ‘ALL’;[/sourcecode]

The results are here:

There is the second set of statistics used for this query, right at the top. Because I was searching the FirstName column, the optimizer found that it did not have the statistics it needed, so they were created, on the fly, and then, were not a part of the execution plan. Further, I probably looked at other statistics such as the PK_Person_BusinessEntityID because that’s the clustered index for the table. It could have scanned that to get the list of values just as easily as the other index. But, that other index is probably smaller, which means fewer pages scanned.

So, back to the question, can you see the statistics used by the optimizer inside the execution plan? Some of them, yes, but not all of them.

Please, if I’m presenting, ask questions. I’ll know a few of the answers, right off the top of my head. Others will make me go and learn so that I can answer the next person who asks the same question. I don’t mind losing at a game of Stump the Chump, so let’s play.