Some SQL statements will be running very slow after SET ROWCOUNT or TOP is used. SET ROWCOUNT and TOP are used to tell SQL Server to select a specific number of rows from the SQL statements instead of extracting all records. Not many people know that SQL Server will try to re-optimize your SQL statements after you adding SET ROWCOUNT or TOP, the result is normally good after re-optimization of your SQL statements that can generate query plans for retrieving the first few records as faster as possible. Good Example for Query Re-optimization for SET ROWCOUNT Here the following is an example that shows the SQL takes 6.78 seconds to retrieve 217500 rows from the database, the query plan shows a good plan with a Hash Match for two Table Scan of [DEPARTMENT] and [EMPLOYEE]. The following screen shows the new query plan is generated after the SET ROWCOUNT 1 is used, the query plan is changed from Hash Match to Nested Loops. Nested Loops operation normally provides faster first few records retrieval time but may not be good for overall records extraction in certain situations. It is good to see that SQL Server uses only 0.013 seconds to extract the first row for this SQL. Bad Example for Query Re-optimization for SET ROWCOUNT Let’s see a bad example that shows how SQL Server degrades a good query plan to a bad query plan after the SET ROWCOUNT 1 is used. Here the following is an example that shows the SQL takes 0.118 seconds to retrieve 1613 rows from the database, the query plan is a little bit complex but it is a good query plan to retrieve all 1613 rows. The following screen shows the new query plan is generated after the SET ROWCOUNT 1 is used, the query plan is now changed to Nested Loops with two Table Scans. The new query plan takes 1.312 seconds to extract only the first record, it is even slower than the 0.118 seconds that is used to extract all 1613 rows from the database. How to Solve This Problem? We can use Hints injection or SQL syntax rewrite to influence SQL Server to get back the original plan or generate an even better query plan for the SET ROWCOUNT or TOP operation. The following Hints injection generated a good query plan that is almost 90 times better than the original SQL with SET ROWCOUNT 1. Tosska SQL Tuning Expert (TSES™) for SQL Server® - Tosska Technologies Limited
