Chad Callihan wants the optimizer to sweat a bit:
When you execute a query, the SQL Server query optimizer determines potential query plans and decides which plan is the cheapest. It’s possible for a query to be so simple that there’s no need to bother weighing out different plans before returning results. In this case, SQL Server may use a trivial plan. Let’s look at an example of this plan and one reason why simple may not always be the best.
Click through for an example.