Category: Query Tuning

Kendra Little re-creates a problem:

Adaptive joins let the optimizer choose between a Hash Join and a Nested Loop join at runtime, which can be fantastic for performance when row count estimates are variable. Recently, when Erik Darling taught two days on TSQL at PASS Community Data Summit, a student asked why a query plan where an adaptive join used a Nested Loop at runtime ended up with a large memory grant anyway.

I didn’t remember the answer to this, but the great thing about co-teaching is that Erik did: adaptive joins always start executing as Hash Joins, which means they have to get memory grants upfront. Even if the query ultimately switches to a Nested Loop at runtime, that memory grant was already allocated. This has real implications for memory usage, especially in high-concurrency environments.

Read on for a dive into adaptive joins, how they work, and the consequences when the database engine makes use of them.

Kendra Little talks baggage:

I see this pattern repeatedly: a “wide” query that returns many columns and less than 100k rows runs slowly. SQL Server gets slow when it drags large amounts of baggage through the entire query plan, like a solo traveler struggling with massive suitcases in an airport instead of picking them up close to their destination.

SQL Server often minimizes data access by grabbing all the columns it needs early in query execution, then doing joins and filters. This means presentation columns get picked up early.

Read on to see the effects of this, as well as what you can do to mitigate the issue.

Frederic Yhuel troubleshoots an issue:

We recently encountered a strange optimizer behaviour, reported by one of our customers:

Customer: “Hi Dalibo, we have a query that is very slow on the first execution after a batch process, and then very fast. We initially suspected a caching effect, but then we noticed that the execution plan was different.”

Dalibo: “That’s a common issue. Autoanalyze didn’t have the opportunity to process the table after the batch job had finished, and before the first execution of the query. You should run the VACUUM ANALYZE command (or at least ANALYZE) immediately after your batch job.”

Customer: “Yes, it actually solves the problem, but… your hypothesis is wrong. We looked at pg_stat_user_tables, and are certain that the tables were not vacuumed or analyzed between the slow and fast executions. We don’t have a production problem, but we would like to understand.”

Dalibo: “That’s very surprising! we would also like to understand…”

So let’s dive in!

Read on for a description of the issue and what Frederic and team found.

Erik Darling finally gets HR involved. The sad and/or clever part is that I wrote that line before Erik made the joke.

This is Part 1 in a set of videos covering Erik’s talk for PASS Data Community Summit in 2025. As is usual, Erik’s videos are worth watching even though he doesn’t give me even one paragraph that I can copy and include as a graf here, meaning that I need to type in more in order to make it so that any RSS feed reader connected to Curated SQL doesn’t panic and force you to open the post because it’s too short, and thus causing me to write even longer run-on sentences than I normally would write, though I typically indulge myself in run-on sentences so the blame isn’t 100% on Erik; in short, Erik allows me to use semi-colons more often, and I appreciate it.