SQL Server Query Processor is perhaps the least visible and least well-known part of SQL Server. It does not expose a large set of public features, and it allows very limited control in a documented and supported way. It accepts a query as input, compiles and optimizes it to generate the execution plan, and finally executes it.
This chapter discusses the query life cycle and provides a high-level overview of the query optimization process. It explains how SQL Server executes queries, discusses several commonly used operators, and addresses query and table hints that ...
