Gail Shaw explains the concept of deferred compilation:
When I talked about row estimations for table variables, I mentioned ‘deferred compile’, but didn’t give a whole lot of details. What, then, is a deferred compilation? Let’s start with how batches work normally.
T-SQL is an interpreted language. While we talk about compiles, they’re not compilations in the sense of what happens to C++. There’s no conversion of the script to a machine language or intermediate language which is used from that point onwards. Every time a batch executes, it has to be parsed, bound and have an execution plan generated or fetched from cache.
Click through to learn what it does mean.