Dave Ballantyne (11/6/2012)
Hi,I would be careful about making any form of 'X is faster than Y' statements , ever!
In this case i have found ,annecdotally, that PIVOT has a relatively high startup cost.
So, if you have a 'sparse' set of data if can be faster to use the cross tab, with more dense PIVOT. YMMV 🙂
That's interesting. When I did the performance analysis in this article on UNPIVOT (http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/CROSS+APPLY+VALUES+UNPIVOT/91234/), I considered sparseness and I didn't notice any marked difference.
Not saying you're wrong mind you. Just noting.
My thought question: Have you ever been told that your query runs too fast?
My advice:
INDEXing a poor-performing query is like putting sugar on cat food. Yeah, it probably tastes better but are you sure you want to eat it?
The path of least resistance can be a slippery slope. Take care that fixing your fixes of fixes doesn't snowball and end up costing you more than fixing the root cause would have in the first place.
Need to UNPIVOT? Why not CROSS APPLY VALUES instead?[/url]
Since random numbers are too important to be left to chance, let's generate some![/url]
Learn to understand recursive CTEs by example.[/url]
[url url=http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/St