GilaMonster (7/6/2013)

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Jeff Moden (7/6/2013)

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For example, here's a classic case of why many people come to the erroneous conclusion that a recursive CTE that counts is lightning fast compared to many of the other methods which are actually much faster than the recursive method. Run the following with the actual execution plan on and note the "% of Batch" for both queries. It shows the rCTE take 0% of the time and the "Tally" method taking 100% of the time. Yet, if you look at the print outs in the Messages tab, you'll find that the opposite is true.

In this particular case it's because the optimiser costs the recursive CTE based on either just the anchor member or on the anchor member and one recursive step (can't remember which). Hence the estimates are wildly inaccurate.

Exec plans tell you how the query runs. Execution statistics tell you how the query performs.