This evening SQL Sentry has pushed out a new build of Plan Explorer 1.2 (build #6.1.32), fixing a couple of minor issues brought to our attention by users.

1. Eric Humphrey (@lotsahelp) pointed out that our query timeout for generating an actual plan was set to 30 seconds. This was an oversight, but chances are you wouldn't see this in most cases:
   • if your query started returning rows right away, the timeout wouldn't occur, even if the query took longer than 30 seconds to complete;
   • if your query returned no rows (e.g. WAITFOR > 30 seconds), or took more than 30 seconds to start returning rows, the timeout would occur.
2. Geoff Hiten (@SQLCraftsman) came across a plan that opened fine in Management Studio, but failed to open in Plan Explorer. This was certainly a first for us; usually, it is the other way around – SSMS frequently chokes on large or complicated plans that Plan Explorer opens with ease. In this case, the issue was caused by a self-referencing expression causing memory troubles in our new "Expressions" tab – which shows, among other expression details, a tree view of expression dependencies. So you can imagine what might happen with a circular reference – the code was prepared for a cap of 100 nested expansions per reference, but only if rendering them required less memory than what was available on the machine.

Both of these issues have been fixed and tested in the current download, which I recommend you apply to your system(s):

https://sentryone.com/plan-explorer

As always, please let me know if you have any questions about Plan Explorer, or come across any issues at all using the free tool.