BTW Mr Fritchey, I get your book two days ago, is really good.

I will reorganize all indexes ( last time I did a rebuild ) and upodate the stats to...

Yes I use sp_updatestats, The query is actually the same I am running ( just with different names)--something weird us that if I add one more number to the like...

Just for you to know ( maybe it would help) that column is the primary key, clustered and is a varchar(23), I and checking the index fragmentation (0.928468598)

The statistics of...

Presumably, with an index on the column and the LIKE operator only have a wild card at the end of the string, you have a sargeable (search argument able) query....

How many rows are in the table ?

A\ 70 million rows

How many rows does the query above really return ?

A\query returns about 70 thousand

What do your indexes look like ?

...

even simplier:

select

a.column2,

a.column4,

a.column6

from

dbo.table1 a

where

a.column like 'abcdef00001%'

and a.column7 <> '0'

I attached the plan

Thanks

I simplify the query a lot, I need the others tables, but with just the one with the a.column_key like ....., is enough to have a really poor performance