SQLRNNR (5/4/2015)
I am curious. What are the relative costs of those index seeks? Just gonna skip past that remote query for now because you can't do much with that anyway.
So funny... I Google for a proper way to rename (or not to) sprocs, and found an article from you, lol ... about effect of sp_rename on system catalog. Different issue though.
Anyway, original plan the cost is 100% of the plan (for that particular statement) . With the new Index, it dropped to 40% or something , passing the remaining cost to the TOP operator.
By the way, I can't remove the TOP because the query's logic. I need the most recent records after getting the set. The TOP accomplishes that.