SQL Interview: 42 OPTION LABEL

This is a post in the SQL Interview series. These aren’t trick or gotcha questions, they’re just questions designed to scope out a candidate’s knowledge around SQL Server and Azure SQL Database.

Section: Developer Level: Medium

Question:

You have a series of very similar SQL queries in an application.

You notice that one of them includes an OPTION LABEL clause.

What would this be used for?

Answer:

OPTION LABEL allows you to apply a label to an instance of a query. That then makes it easy to trace executions of the query using tools like Extended Events or SQL Server Profiler.

2025-05-02