In my last post , I showed how SQL Server 2005 only updates non-clustered indexes when the data in the index actually changes. For my example, I used a simple update statement that results in a per-row or narrow plan. In this post, I'll show how this...

Insert, update, and delete plans consist of two parts. The first part or read cursor identifies the list of rows to be inserted, update, or deleted. The second part or write cursor performs the actual insert, update, or delete. Let's look at a simple...

Last week I wrote about a special case of the TOP operator known as ROWCOUNT TOP . This week I'll take a look at some other interesting TOP scenarios. In general, TOP is a fairly mundane operator. It simply counts and returns the specified number of rows...