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When Compute Scalars Attack

Erik Darling goes scalar hunting:

This is awful. It really is. It’s so awful. These operators skated by undetected for years. Acting so innocent with their 0% cost.

Subprime operators, or something.

In this post, I’m going to show you how compute scalars hide work, and how interpreting them in actual execution plans can even be tricky.

I’m now imagining Erik as the Steve Irwin of the query tuning world. And it’s kind of working for me.