The requirement to track query performance statistics over time had been a long-time request by SQL Server users, because it unlocks the ability to go back in time and understand trends, but also point-in-time occurrences. Maybe our company website glitched because there was a point-in-time issue with the database, or a critical application sometimes slows down without a predictable pattern, or we upgrade from an older version of SQL Server and suddenly part of our workload is much slower. Barring any hardware problems, all these scenarios can usually be boiled down to one common cause—query plan optimization choices. This led to the creation of the Query Store (QS)—an effective flight recorder for our databases that's available in SQL Server (starting with SQL Server 2016) and Azure SQL Database, including Managed Instance.
Recall what we discussed...
