If we remember, for the CE 120 it was a one row estimate, and in this case server decided, that it is cheaper to use a non-clustered index and then make a lookup into clustered. Not very effective if we remember that our predicate returns all rows.
In CE 130 there was a 365 rows estimate, which is too expensive for key lookup and server decided to make a clustered index scan.
But, wait, what we see is that in the second plan the estimate is also 1 row!
That fact seemed to me very curious and that’s why I’m writing this post. To find the answer, let’s look in more deep details at how the optimization process goes.
This was an interesting look at how the optimizer looks at scalar user-defined functions.