Learn to Read Execution Plans

Reading execution plans is easy right? Look for the highest cost operators or scans and you're pretty much done. Not really. Execution plans are actually quite complicated and can hide more information than the graphical plan reveals. However, if you learn how to walk through the details of an execution plan, you will be more thoroughly prepared to understand the information in that plan. We'll unlock and decode where the information is within a plan in order for you to know why the optimizer made certain choices. You'll be able to better understand how your T-SQL code is interpreted by the optimizer. All this knowledge will make it easier to debug and tune your T-SQL.