Lynn Pettis (1/27/2009)
Smendle (1/27/2009)
That can happen on multi-processor systems that SQL is allowed to use.I am sure this is in response to the following:
I received a private message with a question regarding my article that I can't answer, so I thought I'd put it here with the hopes that some of the gurus (Jeff, Gail, Grant, Gus, et al) out there may be able to help out.
Why is the CPU time greater than the elapsed time
CPU time = 5063 ms, elapsed time = 3309 ms.
Thinking about it, that actually makes sense and isn't something I'd have come up with on my own, thanks. Do any of the other gurus out there also agree?
The answer to this question is parallelism. The cpu time is greater because the query is spread across multiple processors, which allows you to do a lot more cpu processing in a shorter period of time. This is how CPU time becomes greater than elapsed time. If you set max dop to 1, you will not see the same behavior.