• Don't look at the costs. Those are estimates, and they have to add to 100%. Knowing that something is 33% or 25% is useless, it says nothing of any value. 50% in a query that takes 10ms is faster than 2% of a query that takes 10 minutes.

    Look at the duration. Look at the CPU time. Look at the reads. Don't look at costs when you're tuning queries.

    Gail Shaw
    Microsoft Certified Master: SQL Server, MVP, M.Sc (Comp Sci)
    SQL In The Wild: Discussions on DB performance with occasional diversions into recoverability

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