In my past two posts, I explained how SQL Server may add a sort to the outer side of a nested loops join and showed how this sort can significantly improve performance . In an earlier post , I discussed how SQL Server can use random prefetching to improve...

In my last post, I discussed how SQL Server can use sorts to transform random I/Os into sequential I/Os. In this post, I'll demonstrate directly how such a sort can impact performance. For the following experiments, I'll use the same 3 GByte database...