By putting small table first you do assure that if the Query Optimizer (not a Query Analyzer of course) for some reason fails and decides to go your way the...

SQL Server needs statistics to figure out the row counts for to be joined tables. So, it does affect the order in joins.

I was trying to address the same problem "Which JOIN order is better ?" and came to the following conclusion. It IS BETTER when the first table in JOIN is...

Sorry, my bad 😉 - of course I can’t. Fixing my typo ...

I was trying to compare the one table to multiple table-joins, like below:

SELECT …

FROM Table1 t1

JOIN Table2 t2...

If your query has JOIN(s) involving @table_variable then Query Optimizer would likely generate sub-optimal execution plans. Beside the hardcoded row_count = 1 when using table variables it ignores possible parallel...

If you are using @table_variable in your query then it is "by design". Query Optimizer hardcodes the estimated row count for tables variables to be always 1.

Thank you for your response. There are many reasons to do XML conversion on the business tier - for example: the data set migt be requested from the database once...