Analyzing plans

To really understand query plans and really be able to spot, fix, or work around problems with query plans requires a solid understanding of the query operators that make up these plans. Overall, too many operators are available to discuss them in one chapter. Moreover, you can combine these operators into query plans in innumerable ways. Thus, this section focuses on understanding the most common query operators—the most basic building blocks of query execution—and give some insight into when and how SQL Server uses them to construct a variety of interesting query plans. Specifically, this section looks at scans and seeks, joins, aggregations, unions, a selection of subquery plans, and parallelism. After you understand how these ...

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