Plan hinting

A lot of misinformation exists about query hints, and often the misuse of hints can cause the creation of global policies for or against the use of hints in queries. One goal of this chapter is to give DBAs and developers the tools they need to have a different kind of conversation about the design, implementation, and maintenance of SQL Server applications. This section explains query hints and when to use them.

Earlier, this chapter discussed some of the problems that the engineering team faced with Query Optimizer. The complexity of some algorithms involved in optimizing SQL queries is high enough that exploring every possible query plan for every query that can be sent to the system is impossible. Latency restrictions in statistics ...

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