Query optimization is a resource-intensive process that could introduce a significant CPU load on busy servers. SQL Server tries to minimize such load by caching plans in a special part of the process memory called the plan cache.
This chapter talks about plan caching in detail and consists of two parts. The first part provides a high-level overview of plan caching and discusses several issues associated with it. The second part dives deeper into plan cache internals and discusses the various data management views (DMVs) that you can use for plan cache monitoring.
