Jacob, thank you for the great explanation! 🙂

Lynn Pettis: I am attaching the files. Please let me know if you need anything else. Thanks!

Curiously, when I tried to simplify the above solution using nested queries as shown below, the results were somewhere in-between in terms of speed (about 25 secs). Theoretically, the query...

Someone on another site guessed that perhaps SQL Server was executing full-text search for every row returned by the other branch of the execution plan and suggested to try breaking...