SQL Server Query Execution Plan from Cache
There are many ways to obtain the execution plan of a SQL Server query, each of which serves a particular purpose, for example if you can run a query easily, then the best way to get an execution plan is to simply enable the execution plan (either through SSMS or SETting the correct session option), but if the query takes a long time to run, or you simply cannot run the query any other reason, then you might decide to profile the query when it is naturally running (perhaps on the live environment) through SQL Profiler.
In this post I will go through a simple SQL query to extract the execution plan from SQL’s own plan cache. There are many reasons why this might not be an accurate way to extract a query, but it is certainly helpful in situation were you have good understanding of your DB setup.