In this example, I’m going to focus on both of those. The execution plan below is very large, but we are going to focus on a couple of high-value things. [Click on image for larger view.] Figure 1.

SQL Server has an optimizer that usually does a great job of optimizing code for the most effective execution. A query execution plan is the breakdown of how the optimizer will run (or ran) a query.

Finally, the other major area of memory (in SQL Server) is known as the execution plan cache, which stores the compiled order of operations the database uses to return the results of your queries.