Updates

Updates are an interesting area within query processing. In addition to many of the challenges faced while optimizing traditional SELECT queries, update optimization also considers physical optimizations such as how many indexes need to be touched for each row, whether to process the updates one index at a time or all at once, and how to avoid unnecessary deadlocks while processing changes as quickly as possible. The Optimizer contains several features specific to updates that help make queries complete as quickly as possible. This section discusses a number of these optimizations.

The term update processing actually includes all top-level commands that change data, such as INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, and MERGE. As you see in this section, ...

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