Ever had that moment where you start getting errors from code that you’ve tested a million times? I had that one recently. I had this little bit of code for pulling information directly from query plans in cache:

WITH XMLNAMESPACES(DEFAULT N'http://schemas.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2004/07/showplan'),
QueryPlans AS
(
SELECT RelOp.pln.value(N'@PhysicalOp', N'varchar(50)') AS OperatorName,
RelOp.pln.value(N'@NodeId',N'integer') AS NodeId,
RelOp.pln.value(N'@EstimateCPU', N'decimal(10,9)') AS CPUCost,
RelOp.pln.value(N'@EstimateIO', N'decimal(10,9)') AS IOCost,
dest.text
FROM sys.dm_exec_query_stats AS deqs
CROSS APPLY sys.dm_exec_sql_text(deqs.sql_handle) AS dest
CROSS APPLY sys.dm_exec_query_plan(deqs.plan_handle) AS deqp
CROSS APPLY deqp.query_plan.nodes(N'//RelOp') RelOp (pln)
)
SELECT  qp.OperatorName,
        qp.NodeId,
        qp.CPUCost,
        qp.IOCost,
        qp.CPUCost + qp.IOCost AS EstimatedCost
FROM    QueryPlans AS qp
WHERE   qp.text = 'some query or other in cache'
ORDER BY EstimatedCost DESC;

I’ve probably run this… I don’t know how many times. But… I’m suddenly getting an error:

Msg 8114, Level 16, State 5, Line 7

Error converting data type nvarchar to numeric.

What the hell? There is no where this should be occurring. I dig through the query over and over and I can’t figure it out. Until… I finally notice that one of the operators in the plan has the CPUCost value stored as a float:

EstimateCPU=”1e-006″

Ummmm, since when? Since forever. I’ve just been lucky with my code. I’d just never hit a sufficiently small cost in the plans before. I hadn’t bothered to look for the actual data type in use in the schema definition, although it’s right there:

<xsd:attribute name=”EstimateCPU” type=”xsd:double” use=”required”/>

I never did one thing right in my life, you know that? Not one. That takes skill.

What did I do wrong? I was looking at the data output from the queries and in the plans rather than looking at the structure to know what to expect. It’s the kind of thing I would never do with T-SQL. I would always look to the table structure to know what data type a given column was. But in this case, with the XML, I looked at the data and made an assumption. And we all knows what that means. It makes an ass out of you and mption.

Or, in this case, me and mption.

Anyway, the corrected query is a pretty trivial change:

WITH XMLNAMESPACES(DEFAULT N'http://schemas.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2004/07/showplan'),
QueryPlans AS
(
SELECT RelOp.pln.value(N'@PhysicalOp', N'varchar(50)') AS OperatorName,
RelOp.pln.value(N'@NodeId',N'integer') AS NodeId,
RelOp.pln.value(N'@EstimateCPU', N'float') AS CPUCost,
RelOp.pln.value(N'@EstimateIO', N'float') AS IOCost,
dest.text
FROM sys.dm_exec_query_stats AS deqs
CROSS APPLY sys.dm_exec_sql_text(deqs.sql_handle) AS dest
CROSS APPLY sys.dm_exec_query_plan(deqs.plan_handle) AS deqp
CROSS APPLY deqp.query_plan.nodes(N'//RelOp') RelOp (pln)
)
SELECT  qp.OperatorName,
        qp.NodeId,
        qp.CPUCost,
        qp.IOCost,
        qp.CPUCost + qp.IOCost AS EstimatedCost
FROM    QueryPlans AS qp
WHERE   qp.text = 'SELECT * FROM HumanResources.vEmployee AS ve'
ORDER BY EstimatedCost DESC;

But I do feel bad if anyone has been using this the way I showed it. ‘Cause, yeah, I’ve demonstrated with this code in the past. Oops. However, great point. Especially when working with a public XML schema like this, it pays to go and look at that schema the same way you would a table in order to ensure that you’re using the correct data types.

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