In this session, I will elaborate on the pros and cons of each feature within the Intelligent Query Processing package. I will briefly present cases where a feature can be beneficial for your workload, but you can also see potential issues you can have with it and how to mitigate them, including my experience from the production system on critical and less critical servers (for IQP features in SQL Server 2017 and 2019, and at that point most probably in SQL Server 2022 too).

Depending on your workload, the way your team develops SQL projects, or even your knowledge, an IQP feature can significantly improve the performance of one of your applications, but the very same feature can cause performance degradation in another. When the Compatibility Level for a database is set to 150 or 160, all available IQP features are enabled by default. Therefore, you have to decide whether a particular feature should be enabled or disabled for each database. You might have databases where it is better to disable one or even more IQP features. After this session, you will be better prepared for the challenges associated with this decision.

It would be great if the attendees would actively participate in the discussion and share their own experience, excitement, or concerns.