Translate query using APPLY to run under compatibility level 80

Question

I want to use the following query:

SELECT  
    SUBSTRING(qt.TEXT, ( qs.statement_start_offset / 2 ) + 1,
     ( ( CASE qs.statement_end_offset
           WHEN -1 THEN DATALENGTH(qt.TEXT)
           ELSE qs.statement_end_offset
         END - qs.statement_start_offset ) / 2 ) + 1) AS [Text] ,
 qs.execution_count ,
 qs.total_logical_reads ,
 qs.last_logical_reads ,
 qs.total_logical_writes ,
 qs.last_logical_writes ,
 qs.total_worker_time ,
 qs.last_worker_time ,
 qs.total_elapsed_time / 1000000 total_elapsed_time_in_S ,
 qs.last_elapsed_time / 1000000 last_elapsed_time_in_S ,
 qs.last_execution_time ,
 qp.query_plan
FROM sys.dm_exec_query_stats qs
 CROSS APPLY sys.dm_exec_sql_text(qs.sql_handle) qt
    CROSS APPLY sys.dm_exec_query_plan(qs.plan_handle) qp
ORDER BY qs.total_worker_time DESC 

I took the code snippet from How to find CPU intensive queries? on the SQL Server Central blogs.

I need to run this query on database which is in compatibility mode 80 and APPLY is not available there.

Answer 1

The results from that query will not be scoped to particular database. They will show activity across the whole instance.

In general, it would be quite difficult to provide information at this granularity, because queries can access data from more than one database (Azure SQL Database aside).

In non-trivial queries, accounting for costs on a per-database basis (e.g. after joins and aggregations have been performed) would be pretty much impossible. Some DMVs do provide information about the context database at the time a query was executed, but again, the query might have accessed objects in an entirely different database(s).

The easiest answer, therefore, is to simply run the query in the context of a database that is set to compatibility level 90 or higher, such as tempdb or master. It will not affect the results (aside from not producing an error).

If this is not a suitable solution, please edit your question to clarify.