You have a Microsoft Azure virtual machine that has Microsoft SQL Server installed. The virtual machine contains five databases. You need to identify whether the performance of queries to the…

Server-side tracing (like SQL Server Profiler traces) captures events but is generally resource-intensive and more suited for specific, short-term troubleshooting rather than continuous historical performance analysis for query degradation.

Extended Events is a lightweight and configurable event monitoring system for detailed real-time troubleshooting, but it requires careful configuration and subsequent analysis, making it less straightforward than Query Store for identifying general query performance degradation over time.

Query Store is a SQL Server feature that automatically captures a history of queries, execution plans, and runtime statistics. It stores this data within the user database, allowing administrators to easily identify performance regressions, analyze execution plan changes, and pinpoint specific queries that have degraded over time, making it ideal for checking performance over the last two weeks.

Policy-Based Management is a system for managing and enforcing configuration policies across SQL Server instances and databases, not for analyzing query performance degradation.