As asked above, we need to know what version / service pack level you are on.  You might also consider running a trace on all of the Errors & Warnings...

Is there one specific column in the table that would potentially have the vulgar word, or is it spread out among multiple columns?  It seems like a pretty straight-forward task...

Possible answer off the MS TechNet site - The answer makes sense!

(in response to the exact same question posed here):

The way the first query is written forces the joins in...

FYI - I just tested (and verified) that this behavior exists in Enterprise SP3a as well as Personal Edition SP3a.

Yep, doesn't seem to impact the optimizers chosen path on each statement.  #1 and #3 are treated identically; #2 is the special case regardless of execution order.  I also perform...

What'll really blow your mind is that the sample I created here always results in the 2nd query running more efficiently (which I love to hear, since that is my...

I already considered parallelism as the deviation here but don't think it's the case.  None of the execution plans reveal a parallelism step, and if I explicitly force a MAXDOP...

I agree that the optimizer *should* use the same plan every time, but it's obvious (on my end) that it treats the first and third syntax style the same but...

No idea why you are getting the same execution plan for the queries...  As stated above we're on SQL 2k SP3.  Compatability level is 80 (default).  Here are the execution...

I was able to reproduce the problem with a simpler example - hopefully this gives some insight into where my problem was.  Apparently this nested JOIN feature doesn't matter on...

I agree with the above poster that more background is needed; but you might consider using the table datatype if you are in a SQL 2k environment and are...