Summary

In this chapter, we showed you how a better understanding of what the query processor does behind the scenes can help both database administrators and developers write better queries, as well as provide the query optimizer with the information it needs to produce efficient execution plans. In the same way, we showed you how to use your newfound knowledge of the query processor’s inner workings and SQL Server tools to troubleshoot cases when your queries are not performing as expected. Based on this, the basics of the query optimizer, the execution engine, and the plan cache were explained. These SQL Server components will be covered in greater detail later in this book.

Because we will be using execution plans throughout this book, we also introduced you to how to read them, their more important properties, and how to obtain them from sources such as the plan cache and a server trace. This should have given you enough background to follow along with the rest of this...