Hi Everybody,

Congratulation to Yair Gutman who won a free ticket to the Advanced Programming in SQL Server 2008 R2 Course !

Here’s the answer to the Quiz:

Let’s first analyze the query without DATEADD:

SELECT

  Orders.Id ,

  Orders.DateAndTime ,

  OrderStatusId

FROM

  Sales.Orders AS Orders

WHERE

  Orders.DateAndTime > SYSDATETIME()

Since SYSDATETIME is a known value at compile time, the estimated number of rows is correct.

Let’s analyze the effect of DATEADD on a fixed expression:

SELECT

  Orders.Id ,

  Orders.DateAndTime ,

  OrderStatusId

FROM

  Sales.Orders AS Orders

WHERE

  Orders.DateAndTime > DATEADD (YEAR , -2 , '20110801 22:47')

You can see again that SQL Server calculates correctly the value of the DATEADD and thus estimates correctly the amount of rows.

However, when DATEADD is combined with SYSDATETIME(), as in the Quiz, SQL Server has a bug and estimates this expression to be SYSDATETIME() and ignores the DATEADD. This bug isn’t applied when GETDATE() is used.

If you need the DATETIME2 precision, a workaround this bug can be achieved by first calculating the value of the DATEADD function and then running the query with a Dynamic execution, here’s an example:

DECLARE

    @ThresholdDate DATETIME2 = DATEADD (YEAR , -2 , SYSDATETIME())

 EXECUTE sp_executesql N'

    SELECT

      Orders.Id ,

      Orders.DateAndTime ,

      OrderStatusId

    FROM

      Sales.Orders AS Orders

    WHERE

      Orders.DateAndTime > @ThresholdDate', N'@ThresholdDate DATETIME2', @ThresholdDate

As a result of our Quiz, Erland Sommarskog, has added the bug to connect:

https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/details/685903/incorrect-estimate-when-sysdatetime-appear-in-a-dateadd-expression

Please vote, so Microsoft quickly fixes it!

I would like to thank Guy Glantser and Haim Fishner for their great contribution in finding this bug !