Despite the many metric tons of blog posts warning people about this stuff, I still see many local variables and optimize for unknown hints. As a solution to parameter sniffing, it’s probably the best choice 1/1000th of the time. I still end up having to fix the other 999/1000 times, though.
In this post, I want to show you how using either optimize for unknown or local variables makes my job — and the job of anyone trying to fix this stuff — harder than it should be.
Click through for two methods, both of which end up being the wrong answer.