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Thinking Like the SQL Server Engine

Brent Ozar has started a series based on a video of the same name:

7,405 pages is about 15 reams of paper.
You know those 500-page packs of paper that you put into the copier or the printer? (No? Do you remember copiers and printers? Honestly, me neither.) The Users table is one of the smallest tables in the Stack Overflow database export, but it’s still 15 of those packs.

As we work through demos in the upcoming posts, I want you to visualize a stack of 15 reams of paper over in the corner of your room. When I ask you to query the table, I want you to think about how you’d execute that as a human being facing data spread across 15 reams of paper. It’d be a hell of a lot of work, and you wouldn’t be so eager to go grab the first piece of paper to start work. You’d wanna build a really good plan before you go tackle that stack of paper.

That’s a lot of paper.