Book Review: Complete Showplan Operators

I’ve been meaning to write about this book for quite a while. Complete Showplan Operators by Fabiano Amorim is a wonderful book, and a great example of the books that our friends at Red-Gate have made available for free, over the years, as part of their Simple Talk series.

Clearly, reading execution plans in detail isn’t for everyone, but any developer working with SQL Server should be across much of this content.

We offer an online and on-demand course called SQL Server Execution Plans for Developers and DBAs and it has been very popular.

Content

I found the order that Fabiano covered the content in, was really sensible. Curiously he started with Assert. I thought that was odd, but it really did make sense in the overall plan for covering operators.

The book spends a good amount of time on lookups, both bookmark and key lookups. It’s hard to describe just how important it is to understand them.

A substantial amount of the book is dedicated to the various types of spools, like eager spools, lazy spools, non-clustered index spools, and row count spools. While, again, these are really important, in most books, they don’t get much coverage.

The remainder of the book then gets into aggregates, sorts, mergers, splits, etc.

The only thing I’d do differently is spend much more time on the different types of joins and how they are implemented in SQL Server, but this is a minor criticism.

If you take our course that I mentioned above, you’ll see a lot of content on that.