Query plans are merely set of steps that will be running in specific order to achieve user defined operation(s). Such ideas are widely presented in all known and unknown areas. In order to light up a fire, someone might find a piece of stick, a rock and hays, scratch the stick on the rock, make the temporature of the stick high enough to light itself or the hays. But you may just go to grocery store to buy matches or lighters and use them to burn the hays. Mapping those 2 approaches in SQL Server, those are 2 query plans.

Continue reading “Query Plan (02) – Set of Steps” →

A computer is a programmable hardware unit with many components integrated. CPU is one of the most important components which provides set of functionalities for calculations and memory/IO access. CPU can load data from memory to registries(memory units in CPU), perfrom calculation based on loaded data, and then following instructions within loaded data saves the result back to memory. Let’s say you want to add 2 values together, assuming they are all in the stack. You need to move them to AX and BX registry, perform ADD, and then move result back to stack.

POP AX //read an integer from stack to AX register
POP BX //read another integer from stack to BX register
ADD AX,BX // add 2 32-bit itegers together and save the result into AX
PUSH AX //save result back to stack

After result is saved to the stack, other functions can POP and perform code to show it on the screen. (back old days when MS DOS was prevalence, INT 21 can show charactors on the screen).

Continue reading “Query Plan (01) – T-SQL vs Programming Language” →