Don’t get me wrong, execution plan is one of the best tools at your disposal if you want to optimize a SQL query. No, it is the must have tool. It is not the only tool you will need, but if you have to pick only one, pick it.

But it is important to know that execution plan can be misleading. It is very useful to see where is the bottleneck is within a statement. It is not exactly useful when you need to compare two statements.

Let’s compare these two queries that I am working to optimize

SELECT	OG.OrderGroupId
		FROM	OrderGroup OG
		INNER JOIN	OrderGroup_PurchaseOrder PO ON OG.OrderGroupId = PO.ObjectId WHERE 1 = 1  AND OG.Status IN(SELECT Item FROM ecf_splitlist('Cancelled')) ORDER BY OG.OrderGroupId DESC
        OFFSET 0  ROWS 
        FETCH NEXT 50 ROWS ONLY

versus

SELECT	OG.OrderGroupId
		FROM	OrderGroup OG
		INNER JOIN	OrderGroup_PurchaseOrder PO ON OG.OrderGroupId = PO.ObjectId  WHERE 1 = 1  AND OG.Status IN('Cancelled') ORDER BY OG.OrderGroupId DESC
        OFFSET 0  ROWS 
        FETCH NEXT 50 ROWS ONLY

These are 99% similar, except for the statement OG.Status IN ..., with and without calling the split function.

If you look at the execution plan only, it seems the former is much faster than the latter. It takes only 14% of the time, while the latter takes 86%, so if based on those figures only, we might think the first one is ~6 times faster than the second one.

Except it is not. If we turn on the IO statistics, it is a very different story

The first query has significantly more IO operations than the second

(50 rows affected)
Table 'OrderGroup_PurchaseOrder'. Scan count 0, logical reads 162, physical reads 0, page server reads 0, read-ahead reads 0, page server read-ahead reads 0, lob logical reads 0, lob physical reads 0, lob page server reads 0, lob read-ahead reads 0, lob page server read-ahead reads 0.
Table '#BA76F977'. Scan count 1, logical reads 8386, physical reads 0, page server reads 0, read-ahead reads 0, page server read-ahead reads 0, lob logical reads 0, lob physical reads 0, lob page server reads 0, lob read-ahead reads 0, lob page server read-ahead reads 0.
Table 'OrderGroup'. Scan count 1, logical reads 356, physical reads 0, page server reads 0, read-ahead reads 0, page server read-ahead reads 0, lob logical reads 0, lob physical reads 0, lob page server reads 0, lob read-ahead reads 0, lob page server read-ahead reads 0.

versus

(50 rows affected)
Table 'OrderGroup'. Scan count 1, logical reads 356, physical reads 0, page server reads 0, read-ahead reads 0, page server read-ahead reads 0, lob logical reads 0, lob physical reads 0, lob page server reads 0, lob read-ahead reads 0, lob page server read-ahead reads 0.
Table 'OrderGroup_PurchaseOrder'. Scan count 1, logical reads 143, physical reads 0, page server reads 0, read-ahead reads 0, page server read-ahead reads 0, lob logical reads 0, lob physical reads 0, lob page server reads 0, lob read-ahead reads 0, lob page server read-ahead reads 0.

The first has slightly more logical reads on OrderGroup and OrderGroup_PurchaseOrder, but significantly more in a temp table (which is, inside the ecf_splitlist function).

The moral of the story? Execution plan is helpful, but not to compare query to query. In most cases, IO statistics are much more useful.