A query plan tells you what SQL Server decided to do and, if it's an actual plan, what happened when it did. Most bad plan analysis comes from confusing those two things, or from reaching for the most visually obvious number rather than the one that means something.
Query Plan Analysis is a community-contributed Claude Code skill in the general-misc sub-category. It ships as a SKILL.md file that Claude Code auto-discovers under ~/.claude/skills/query-plan-analysis/ and loads when your prompt matches the skill's trigger.
When to invoke it: Use whenever a user shares a query plan, asks why a query is slow, asks what an operator means, asks whether an index would help, or asks you to interpret estimated vs actual rows, spills, memory grants, or parallelism. Prevents the standard wrong conclusions - reading cost percentages as measurements, calling scans bad, or pasting missing-index DDL verbatim.
The Query Plan Analysis Claude Code skill is built for Claude Code users and developers across all disciplines looking for general-purpose AI assistance. It's part of ClaudSkills (also referred to as Claude Skills or Claude Code Skills) — the open community-curated registry of 196,000+ SKILL.md files for Anthropic's Claude Code agent and the wider Claude ecosystem (Claude API, Claude Agent SDK).
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills/query-plan-analysis curl -L https://claudskills.com/skills/query-plan-analysis/SKILL.md \ -o ~/.claude/skills/query-plan-analysis/SKILL.md
Or just download SKILL.md directly and drop it into ~/.claude/skills/query-plan-analysis/. Claude Code auto-discovers it on next session.
Skills live at ~/.claude/skills/query-plan-analysis/SKILL.md on macOS/Linux, or %USERPROFILE%\.claude\skills\query-plan-analysis\SKILL.md on Windows. See the full install guide for step-by-step instructions.
Open @claudskills_bot on Telegram, tap Open Desktop App, and the desktop app installs this skill for you. Or share the bot link with a colleague — they get the same one-tap install. Learn more →
The ClaudSkills desktop app installs any skill directly into ~/.claude/skills/ with one click — no terminal required. Pro starts at $9/mo or $149 lifetime.
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SKILL.md from the source repository to ~/.claude/skills/query-plan-analysis/SKILL.md and restart Claude Code. Both flows are detailed at claudskills.com/install/.SKILL.md file that lives under ~/.claude/skills/<name>/ and tells the Claude Code CLI agent how to perform a specific task (instructions, prompts, allowed tools). Skills are auto-discovered at session start. Query Plan Analysis is one of 67,000+ skills indexed in the open ClaudSkills catalog, classified under the General category. Learn more at /learn/what-is-a-claude-skill/.If you reference this skill in a blog post, paper, or documentation, you can cite it as:
@misc{query-plan-analysis-2026,
author = {erikdarlingdata},
title = {Query Plan Analysis [Claude Code skill]},
year = {2026},
publisher = {ClaudSkills},
url = {https://claudskills.com/skills/query-plan-analysis/}
}Grade A · scanned 2026-09-28 — free static scan against the OWASP Agentic Skills Top 10.
No risk patterns were found in any of the ten OWASP-aligned categories. How grading works ›
Browse all General skills in the ClaudSkills registry, or explore these other picks from the same category:
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SKILL.md files, not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Anthropic.