Optimizing OR Clauses

Daniel Hutmacher looks at different ways of optimizing queries with multiple conditionals and different parameters:

The SQL Server query optimizer can find interesting ways to tackle seemingly simple operations that can be hard to optimize. Consider the following query on a table with two indexes, one on (a), the other on (b):

SELECT a, b
FROM #data
WHERE a<=10 OR b<=10000;

The basic problem is that we would really want to use both indexes in a single query.

We get to see a few different versions of the query as well as the execution plans which result.