jim.jaggers1 (9/7/2010)
Can you help me understand the difference in the Nested Loops operator between the first and second plan? Other than the '!' point warning symbol in the first plan they look the same to me. How can you tell one is doing a Cartesion Join while the other is doing an Inner join?
The exclamation point is shown where compiler warnings occur. In this case the warning is: "No Join Predicate". A cartesian product is a join with no join predicate. The other visual clue is that the size of the arrow on the output of the join is *huge* - indicating a very large number of rows.
Paul White
SQLPerformance.com
SQLkiwi blog
@SQL_Kiwi