Itzik Ben-Gan digs into some of the performance considerations around nested derived tables:
Unnesting/substitution of table expressions is a process of taking a query that involves nesting of table expressions, and as if substituting it with a query where the nested logic is eliminated. I should stress that in practice, there’s no actual process in which SQL Server converts the original query string with the nested logic to a new query string without the nesting. What actually happens is that the query parsing process produces an initial tree of logical operators closely reflecting the original query. Then, SQL Server applies transformations to this query tree, eliminating some of the unnecessary steps, collapsing multiple steps into fewer steps, and moving operators around. In its transformations, as long as certain conditions are met, SQL Server can shift things around across what were originally table expression boundaries—sometimes effectively as if eliminating the nested units. All of this in attempt to find an optimal plan.
In this article I cover both cases where such unnesting takes place, as well as unnesting inhibitors. That is, when you use certain query elements it prevent SQL Server from being able to move logical operators in the query tree, forcing it to process the operators based on the boundaries of the table expressions used in the original query.
That’s on my list for a second reading.
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