Query hints are always about tradeoffs—typically you are giving up something, such as flexibility, to achieve more consistency, or very specific performance characteristic. One example of this migt when returning code results, that you would want to see the data as soon as possible, even before the complete set of data has been returned. Did you know that you can return a subset of rows to look at BEFORE the entire result set is returned? The FAST n query hint allows the optimizer to return a specified number of rows as quickly as possible. Imagine an application result screen where… Continue Reading