I'm not sure I understand the question. Are you trying to tune queries where there is a lot NULL columns?

If so, yes, this can be an issue in 2005 and...

Bruce W Cassidy (4/19/2009)

[font="Verdana"]For me personally I prefer C#. But you will probably find there's a bigger audience for VB....

It honestly depends on what the optimizer considers to be a trivial plan. Here's an explanation of how plans are determined: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa226174.aspx

I actually missed that...

Jack Corbett (4/17/2009)

Which is...

You can try joing to dm_exec_plan_attributes and see if the user_id is available for the plans you're interested in. It might not be.

It broke 60 here in the Peoples Republic. Looking good for camping this weekend (although it's going into the 30's over night). I'll be sleeping comfortably in my Hennessy Hammock[/url]...

Not a trigger for monitoring, use a server-side trace.

I'd suggest looking into the waits & queues. Use this white paper from MS.

I completely glossed over the test instance thing on the first read. Yeah, that's a bad idea. You can seriously mess up your environment that way. Testing and development should...

Parallelism, no. Memory yes.

There has to be a difference somewhere. Are they on the same service pack and hot fix #?

If it's considered a trivial execution plan, it won't cache the plan that's created. That looks like a plan that is likely trivial.

BTW, you're posting in the 2008 area for...

If you have multiple plan handles, have you looked at the plans? For the same query, you'll get two plans when parallelism is invoked.

What about the parameters?

Does one of the servers have a different parallelism threshold than the other? How about the parallelism setting? ANSI connection settings? Um, memory allocations, any other kinds...

If I understand the question, you can this to your code

...

--Previous parts of a procedure

SET STATISTICS IO ON;

EXEC something;

SET STATISTICS IO OFF;

--The rest of the procedure

...