Methods, systems, and computer program products for monitoring database queries and executions is disclosed. The query syntax may conform to the structured query language (SQL). The approach supports various performance statistics to be monitored at each step of the query statement's execution plan and for each row processed in order to meet requirements of a near real-time query monitoring solution. Such statistics include timing information plus some miscellaneous statistics like the number of rows processed, the amount of memory used, the amount of data spilled to disk, etc.