Understanding execution plans is a good basic skill for all DBA's and SQL developers. Darren White gives us an overview of what execution plans are in SQL Server and how they are used.
2017-03-10 (first published: 2014-02-18)
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If a query is performing poorly, and you can't understand why, then that query's execution plan will tell you not only what data set is coming back, but also what SQL Server did, and in what order, to get that data. It will reveal how the data was retrieved, and from which tables and indexes, what types of joins were used, at what point filtering, sorting and aggregation occurred, and a whole lot more. These details will often highlight the likely source of any problem.
2020-12-23 (first published: 2013-07-30)
119,575 reads