SHOWPLAN permission denied when including execution plan in Data Explorer

Question

If I select the "Include execution plan" checkbox in the Data Explorer, the query fails:

SHOWPLAN permission denied in database 'StackOverflow'.

I see that this has happened before following maintenance. I don't know whether there was any recent maintenance. It's been several days since the data was updated and longer since an update was deployed, if that's related.

Answer 1

It is annoying but at least the showplan permission has been fixed somewhat by not using the checkbox on the UI but leveraging the SHOWPLAN_TEXT setting yourself as part of the command batch:

SQL

set showplan_text  on
go 
select top 10 *
from posts 
inner join votes v on v.postid = posts.id
go

Result

StmtText                                                             
-------------------------------------------------------------------- 
select top 10 *
from posts inner join
votes v on v.postid = posts.id 

(1 row(s) returned)

StmtText                                                                                                                                                                                                     
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
  |--Top(TOP EXPRESSION:((10)))                                                                                                                                                                              
       |--Nested Loops(Inner Join, OUTER REFERENCES:([v].[PostId], [Expr1003]) OPTIMIZED WITH UNORDERED PREFETCH)                                                                                            
            |--Clustered Index Scan(OBJECT:([StackOverflow].[dbo].[Votes].[UIX_Votes_Id] AS [v]))                                                                                                            
            |--Clustered Index Seek(OBJECT:([StackOverflow].[dbo].[Posts].[UIX_Posts_Id]), SEEK:([StackOverflow].[dbo].[Posts].[Id]=[StackOverflow].[dbo].[Votes].[PostId] as [v].[PostId]) ORDERED FORWARD) 

(4 row(s) returned)

I tried this same script earlier (when I left the comment) and at that time this failed as well.

So consider this now as a temporary workaround.