Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 Administrator's Companion

Summary

While SQL Server 2005 does a great job of automatically optimizing queries and creating the best possible query execution plans, there may be times when you need to manually control the way a query plan is created. SQL Server 2005 presents more than thirty-five query hints to enable you to fine tune and control different attributes of a query plan generation.

In this chapter, we took a detailed look at the three different categories of hints —join, query, and table—along with examples of where they are most useful. We also learned about the new plan guides feature that has been introduced in SQL Server 2005, along with a detailed look at the commands used to create and administer plan guides, best practices, and some common usage examples. ...