What's new in 3.8?

August 13, 2024 in Releases by David Wiseman2 minutes

What's new in 3.8?

Query store plan charts, plan forcing and more...

Query Store Plan Chart

Chart to visualize performance of query plans for a query over time.

From the Top Queries (Query Store) tab, click the query ID for a query to drill down. Click the chart tab at the bottom left to see a chart instead of the plan summary.

Query Store Plan Chart

Forced Plans

A new option is available to force query plans directly from DBA Dash.

Query Store Plan Forcing

You can also view forced plans in the Forced Plans (Query Store) tab. A history of plan forcing operations is kept for plans forced using the DBA Dash GUI, providing a quick undo option.

Query Store Forced Plans

Security for plan forcing

🔒Plan forcing is disabled by default and needs to be enabled in the service configuration tool.

  • In the Options tab, check Enable Communication and Allow Plan Forcing.
  • Add users to the AllowPlanForcing and Messaging database roles to enable users to force plans in the GUI. db_owner will also have access.

Allow Plan Forcing

Check Connections

Old source connections should be removed from the service configuration tool. They use up resources (threads) trying to connect to an instance that no longer exists. The new Check Connections button allows you to check which instances are currently accessible. It will also show the the time of the last collection for the instance - making it easier to see how long an instance has been inaccessible.

Check Connections

Wildcard support for Table Size

Chad Baldwin adds a contribution that improves the flexibility of the table size collection configuration. This makes it easier to track the table size for the databases that you are interested in.

Other

See 3.8.0 release notes for a full list of fixes.