Understanding Query Plans
In the first part of this book, we went through refining and querying the database to get the desired result. In the second part, we learned about solving complex business and data problems and how to query to get the needed result. This part is about optimizing queries to improve query performance.
We now understand how to query and fetch the desired result for complex business problems. In this chapter, we will learn about query plans, and how the SQL Server query optimizer works to generate a query plan and select the appropriate query plan to fetch the desired result.
By the end of this chapter, you will have a basic understanding of query optimization techniques, and an understanding of the query optimizer and what it does. You will also have an understanding of the query execution plan, how it helps to optimize the query, whether the query is efficient or not, and how we can improve or optimize the query for optimal performance. You will also...