An overview of Execution plans
I was asked a question about this recently, so I thought I’d start this blog off with a brief overview of SQL Server’s execution plans.
Simply put, a query’s execution plan is the query translated into a hierarchical set of operators that the query execution engine understands. The query optimiser is responsible for producing this plan.
A query can have a number of different possible execution plans, depending on the resources available on the server, the amount of data in the source tables, the load on the server.