Joins
Join operators are used to join the results of two previous operators in the query plan. They may be joining entire tables or indexes, or they may be joining the results of previous operators in the plan. When we discussed joins in Chapter 1, Anatomy of a Query, we talked about INNER, OUTER, and CROSS joins. These are the logical joins that we would write in our T-SQL statement that tell SQL Server how to combine the rows of multiple tables and views. The join operators in a query plan define the algorithms that SQL Server will use to perform the join. The choice of which join algorithm to use is based on a cost estimate, not on the type of join being performed.
The physical join operators that SQL Server may choose from are Nested ...
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