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Stored Procedure IF Branching and Performance

Erik Darling explains that the IF block in a stored procedure won’t help you with performance:

Making plan choices with IF branches like this plain doesn’t work.
The optimizer compiles a plan for both branches based on the initial compile value.
What you end up with is a stored proc that doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do, and parameter sniffing times two.

Read on to see an example of this. If you really, really want to use an IF block, you could separate the components out into individual stored procedures and call those stored procedures independently.