198 CHAPTER 11 Query Execution Plans and Physical Design
useful. How so? Because if the database thinks the design feature is useful, it will exploit
it in the query execution plan. For example, if an index A is beneficial to a query at
runtime we should expect to see access to index A in the query execution plan for the
query. In this chapter we’ll show examples of the different ways that query execution
plans are presented both in text and graphically by the major database vendors, and
illustrate how they can help improve physical database design.
11.1 Getting from Query Text to Result Set
How does a query submitted to a database get transformed into an answer set? Figure
11.1 shows the basic order of operations that occurs for incoming SQL statements. ...