I’m a big fan of T-SQL Tuesday. Each month there is a host who comes up with a topic, and then anyone who is interested posts on it. February 2019 the host was Andy Leonard (b/t) and the subject was Why do you do what you do?. (Follow the link for the roundup.) One of the many posts was by Hugo Kornelis (b/t) who wrote T-SQL Tuesday #111: Why, tell me why and discussed why he publishes and maintains a library for execution plans. It’s a good read and I recommend you take the time. However, that’s not the point of this post.

Hugo has a library of Execution Plan elements!

https://sqlserverfast.com/epr/

In it he describes the available operators, what properties (common/operator and plan) are available in the XML and some information about plans in general.

I’ve added this to my Study and Reference Materials page if you need the link to it later.