One of the most common problems when running SQL Servers is slow queries. The help desk or database team usually hears that described as the application is slow or the database is slow. In the ...

In earlier versions of SQL Server, after selecting a join algorithm, SQL Server had to process it even if a better alternative might be available. In SQL Server 2017, the query optimizer can now sense ...

For this reason, SQL Server stores execution plans in a cache (called the plan cache), so that the stored execution plan is reused for subsequent executions of a given query.

SQL Server has an optimizer that usually does a great job of optimizing code for the most effective execution. A query execution plan is the breakdown of how the optimizer will run (or ran) a query.

That's great for speeding up processing the next time that query shows up because the plan for the query can simply be pulled from the cache. However, there are any number of queries in any ...

Older versions of SQL Server would frequently use a single execution plan for a query despite having runtime parameter values optimized only for the first execution of the query, thus ensuring that ...

I have a test server hosting several sites using SQL Server Express and SQL Management Studio Express. I've seen one site have an occasional issue where queries to a particular table (the ...

If you set the option in either SQL Server Management Studio or Query Analyzer to see the Execution Plan of the query, you will notice that the above query uses a table scan to find the ...