https://www.ronpub.com/ojdb/OJDB_2016v3i1n03_Koch.html Channel of the paper: Christoph Koch: XML-based Execution Plan Format (XEP), Open Journal of Databases (OJDB), 3 (1), pages 42-52, URN: urn:nbn:de:101:1-201705194654, 2016 en-us https://www.ronpub.com/ojdb/OJDB_2016v3i1n03_Koch.html http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:101:1-201705194654 Execution plan analysis is one of the most common SQL tuning tasks performed by relational database administrators and developers. Currently each database management system (DBMS) provides its own execution plan format, which supports system-specific details for execution plans and contains inherent plan operators. This makes SQL tuning a challenging issue. Firstly, administrators and developers often work with more than one DBMS and thus have to rethink among different plan formats. In addition, the analysis tools of execution plans only support single DBMSs, or they have to implement separate logic to handle each specific plan format of different DBMSs. To address these problems, this paper proposes an XML-based Execution Plan format (XEP), aiming to standardize the representation of execution plans of relational DBMSs. Two approaches are developed for transforming DBMS-specific execution plans into XEP format. They have been successfully evaluated for IBM DB2, Oracle Database and Microsoft SQL.