Hopefully, after reading this chapter, you have a good understanding of the various elements that make up a query execution plan in SQL Server. Nearly everything we need to understand and troubleshoot the performance of our T-SQL queries can be found somewhere in the plan, either in the visible part of the plan, or in the properties windows, which we can access by right-clicking the operators.
In the next chapter and throughout the rest of this book, we will use query execution plans to illustrate various T-SQL patterns and anti-patterns so we can identify and remediate them in our own code.