T-SQL Tuesday #43 – Hello, Operator?

June 11th is next week. It’s a Tuesday, the second Tuesday of the month, making it T-SQL Tuesday! This is your opportunity to write on a specific topic, along with countless* people from around the SQL community (* at least until the end of the day, when it will be quite easy to count how many people joined in). This month marks 3.5 years since it started, with 42 events held so far.

This month, for number 43, I’m the host. That means that I set the topic, and this blog post is the one that you need to get a comment into so that I can find your post before I collate them.

The topic is Plan Operators. If you ever write T-SQL, you will almost certainly have looked at execution plans (if you haven’t, go look at some now. I mean really – you should be looking at this stuff). As you look at these things, you will almost certainly have had your interest piqued by some, and tried to figure out a bit more about what’s going on.

That’s what I want you to write about! One (or more) plan operators that you looked into. It could be a particular aspect of a plan operator, or you could do a deep dive and tell us everything you know. You could relate a tuning story if you want, or it could be completely academic. Don’t just quote Books Online at me, explain what the operator means to you. You could explore the Compute Scalar operator, or the many-to-many feature of a Merge Join. The Sequence Project, or the Lazy Spool. You’re bound to have researched one of them at some point (if you never have, take the opportunity this week), and have some wisdom to impart. This is a chance to raise the collective understanding about execution plans!

So, the T-SQL Tuesday thing…

If you haven’t heard about T-SQL Tuesday before, then do this exercise with me. Do a quick search for “T-SQL Tuesday”. If you glance down the results,  you’ll see a bunch of posts either inviting people to a T-SQL Tuesday, contributing in one (the ones that contribute link back to the host), or summarising the posts. The ‘host post’ (which this month is this one!) will have a bunch of comments and trackbacks, pointing to all the contributing posts (and hopefully to the summary too). All-in-all, it makes a terrific resource about that particular subject.

So here’s what you do!

1. Some time next Tuesday (GMT) – that’s June 11th 2013 – publish your blog post. If you’re in Australia like me, GMT Tuesday runs from mid-morning on the Tuesday through to mid-morning on Wednesday. If you’re in the US, then it’ll run from Monday evening through to Tuesday evening.

2. Make sure that your post includes, somewhere near the top, the T-SQL Tuesday image (from above), with a link to this post. This helps people find the other posts on the topic, and hopefully encourages others to jump in with their own posts. If it helps, just switch to source/HTML mode, and put the following snippet in there:
<a href="http://sqlblog.com/blogs/rob_farley/archive/2013/06/02/t-sql-tuesday-43-hello-operator.aspx" target="_blank"><img alt="TSQL Tuesday" align="right" border="0" src="http://sqlblog.com/blogs/rob_farley/TSQL2sDay150x150_1B3B2D1E.jpg"/></a>

3. Come back to this post, and write a comment, providing a link to your post. That’s probably the only way I’ll know it’s there. You can tweet, sure (use the hashtag #tsql2sday), but I still might not find it.

4 (optional, but maybe worthwhile). Keep your eye out for other people’s posts, and for when I publish the summary…

That’s about it – happy writing!

Remember: 1: Jun 11 GMT; 2: Image with a link; 3: Comment below.

@rob_farley