Yvonne Vanslageren shows off a very uncommon DBCC command:
DBCC OPTIMIZER_WHATIF is a powerful diagnostic command in SQL Server that allows database administrators and developers to simulate various hardware configurations. By doing so, it shows how the query optimizer would behave under different CPU and memory allocations—without requiring you to physically change server hardware. This makes it an invaluable tool for performance tuning, troubleshooting, and strategic planning in SQL Server environments.
This obviously won’t actually make things faster, but will help you answer questions like “would more CPU cores improve this query or do I need to dump more RAM into the server?”