query-plan-analysis

A workflow for examining a SQL Server execution plan, the report showing how the database intends to run a query and, for actual plans, what happened during execution.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to investigate slow SQL queries, understand plan operators, check estimated versus actual rows, and assess indexes, spills, and memory grants.
Why use it?
It helps distinguish estimated behavior from actual behavior before diagnosing slow queries, avoiding conclusions based only on the most noticeable number or operator.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/erikdarlingdata/claude-plugins/query-plan-analysis
Any agent
npx skills add erikdarlingdata/claude-plugins --skill query-plan-analysis
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/erikdarlingdata/claude-plugins

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 102 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,554 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00102 $0.03554
Opus 5 $0.00051 $0.01777
Sonnet 5 $0.00020 $0.00711
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00355

Measured 2d ago against content hash 7fc0cc9f3d08, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

query-plan-analysis scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/extract.py), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

plugins/sqlserver-query-plans/skills/query-plan-analysis/SKILL.md · 295 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 295 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Reading a SQL Server execution plan

A query plan tells you what SQL Server decided to do and, if it's an actual plan, what happened when it did. Most bad plan analysis comes from confusing those two things, or from reaching for the most visually obvious number rather than the one that means something.

Work through the triage order below. It exists to establish ground truth before you form an opinion, because almost every wrong conclusion about a plan comes from forming the opinion first.

Step 0: extract the plan before you read it

Never read a .sqlplan file directly into context, and never grep one.

  • They are large. A trivial two-table join runs 120 KB; real plans run into megabytes. Reading one wastes your context and you will still miss things, because the interesting attributes are scattered across thousands of lines.
  • They are usually UTF-16, so grep, rg, and friends silently match nothing. Finding no PlanAffectingConvert in a UTF-16 plan tells you nothing at all about whether the plan contains one.
  • Some plans lie about their own encoding: SSMS writes UTF-16, but a plan that has been opened and re-saved is often UTF-8 bytes still declaring encoding="utf-16". Strict XML parsers reject those.

Run the bundled extractor, which handles all of this and prints a digest ordered to match the steps below. It lives at scripts/extract.py, in the same directory as this file. Resolve that to an absolute path and call it with one — your working directory is not the skill directory, and when this skill is installed as a plugin the skill directory is not anywhere you can guess:

python <this-skill-dir>/scripts/extract.py /path/to/plan.sqlplan

It needs only the Python standard library. Add --top 20 to widen the ranked sections on a large plan.

When you need more detail about one operator — its predicates, its seek keys, its per-thread numbers — do not open the raw XML. Ask the extractor:

python <this-skill-dir>/scripts/extract.py /path/to/plan.sqlplan --node 16

Read the full file on GitHub · 295 lines

Files

What ships with it

9 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 295 lines · 102 tokens per session scan A 7fc0cc9f3d08

Subscribe to this mod's changes

query-plan-analysis is a skill published in the GitHub repository erikdarlingdata/claude-plugins (20 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 102 tokens to every session and 3,554 once invoked, about $0.0005 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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