Amazon RDS Performance Insights provides execution plan for RDS SQL Server

Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service) Performance Insights now collects the query execution plans of the resource-intensive SQL queries in Amazon RDS for SQL Server, and stores them over time. It helps you identify if a change in the query execution plan is the cause of performance degradation or stalled query.

A query execution plan is a sequence of steps that database engines use to access data in a relational database management system (RDBMS). The RDBMS query optimizers may not always choose the most optimal execution plan from a set of alternative ways to execute a given query. Hence, database users sometimes need to manually examine and tune the plans to improve performance. This feature allows you to visualize a SQL query with multiple plans and compare those. It can help you determine if a change in performance of a SQL query is due to a different query execution plan in less than a minute.

Amazon RDS Performance Insights is a database performance tuning and monitoring feature of RDS that helps you to visually assess the load on your database and determine when and where to take action. With one click in the Amazon RDS Management Console, you can add a fully-managed performance monitoring solution to your Amazon RDS database.

RDS Performance Insights and this feature are available in all AWS Regions where Amazon RDS is available. To learn more about RDS Performance Insights, read the Amazon RDS User Guide.