Query Plan Tracing

tip

Tracing requires server admin rights, if you do not have admin rights the trace buttons will be disabled

It is not possible to get query plans from a Power Pivot connection.

DAX Studio supports capturing the query plan trace events from a SSAS Tabular server and displaying them.

The events are displayed in a tree view that allows you to expand and collapse to help with navigating around large query plans

Toggling Visibility

You can use the buttons in the top right to turn off one of the plans (Physical or Logical)

You cannot turn off both plans, when you toggle one of the plans off the button for the other plan becomes disabled

Copying Rows

The Physical and Logical Query Plan grids support selecting multiple rows. Use shift-click to select a range of rows (or ctrl-click to select individual rows) and then press Ctrl+C to copy them to the clipboard.

info

Only the query plan text is copied. The Line and Records columns are excluded so that the copied text is easier to paste into an email or an issue report.

Descendant Rowcounts

When you click on a row in the Physical Plan that has a row count the rowcounts of any descendant items will be highlighted and will have an up/down/equals indicator. This can help you see if the particular item has a descendant operation that is iterating or filtering over a much larger dataframe.

Descendant Line Highlighting

Clicking on a row will also highlight the descendant line for that row to ma

Filtering

You can apply text or rowcount filters to the query plan

Sorting

You can sort the query plan by the other columns. Note that when you do this the expand / collapse options are hidden as they no longer make sense. You can get back to the expand/collapse view by sorting on the Line column.

Drill in/out

If you want to focus on a particular subset of the plan you can right click and "drill in" to that section

This will limit the display to just that row and any descedant rows. DAX Studio maintains a stack of drill-in operations so you can repeat the Drill in multiple times and then step back out using the Drill out option

The drill in/out will work regardless of the sort order. So you can do things like find an operation that runs over a large amount of rows, then drill-in, then re-sort

The right-click option to drill out is enabled when you have drilled in one or more times