There is much more to query tuning than reducing logical reads and adding covering nonclustered indexes.  Query tuning is not complete as soon as the query returns results quickly in the development or test environments.  In production, your query will compete for memory, CPU, locks, I/O and other resources on the server.  Today’s ...

When you write a query to return the first few rows from a potential result set, you’ll often use the TOP clause.  To give a precise meaning to the TOP operation, it will normally be accompanied by an ORDER BY clause.  Together, the TOP…ORDER BY construction can be used to precisely identify which top ‘n’ rows should be returned. The ...