If you've looked at any insert, update, or delete plans, including those used in some of my posts, you've probably noticed that nearly all such plans include a top operator. For example, the following update statement yields the following plan: CREATE...

The UNPIVOT operator is the opposite of the PIVOT operator. As I explained in my earlier post , the PIVOT operator takes a normalized table and transforms it into a new table where the columns of the new table are derived from the values in the original...

In my last post , I gave an overview of the PIVOT operator. In this post, I'm going to take a look at the query plans generated by the PIVOT operator. As we'll see, SQL Server generates a surprisingly simple query plan that is essentially just a fancy...

In my next few posts, I'm going to look at how SQL Server implements the PIVOT and UNPIVOT operators. Let's begin with the PIVOT operator. The PIVOT operator takes a normalized table and transforms it into a new table where the columns of the new table...