Gail,

Thanks for helping me... Actually I don't have any performance issue with the default plan. It is just that, I noticed few behavior which I couldn't understand so I wanted...

Gail,

See the attached screenshot of the execution plan, for the query where i forced the non clustered index. As you can see, the non clustered index seek returns exactly 1000...

Gail,

Thanks for your reply.

I understand that because of the TOP operator, SQL terminated the clustered index scan once it had enough rows. But what surprises me, is the no. of...