Summary: A deep dive into SQL Server parallelism, and a potential performance problem with parallel plans that use TOP. There was an interesting question asked by Mark Storey-Smith on dba.stackexchange.com back in October 2011.  He was looking at the execution plan for a query that counts a million rows from a virtual auxiliary table of ...

Last month a new PASS Virtual Chapter was introduced, one with a theme that is near and dear to much of what I like to work on: performance. Tomorrow, Tuesday August 3rd at noon Eastern time, the chapter will have its second meeting, and I will be doing the presentation. The topic is Parallelism and Performance. Here's the abstract:In ...