
We will use the employees table in the sample database for demonstration. You often use self-join to query parents/child relationship stored in a table or to obtain running totals. Only one table is involved in the self-join. The self-join compares values of the same or different columns in the same table. You use self-join to create a result set that joins the rows with the other rows within the same table.īecause you cannot refer to the same table more than one in a query, you need to use a table alias to assign the table a different name when you use self-join. The self-join is a special kind of joins that allow you to join a table to itself using either LEFT JOIN or INNER JOIN clause. Note that you should be familiar with INNER JOIN and LEFT JOIN clauses before going forward with this tutorial. The following query can be an example of this usage method.Summary: in this tutorial, you will learn about a special type of join called SQLite self-join that allows you to join table to itself. In this method, the reference table can be thought of as a source table and the target table will be the table to be updated. Now, if we go back to our position, the MERGE statement can be used as an alternative method for updating data in a table with those in another table. The MERGE statement can be very useful for synchronizing the table from any source table.

The MERGE statement is used to manipulate (INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE) a target table by referencing a source table for the matched and unmatched rows. You can see this SQL Server 2017: SQL Sort, Spill, Memory and Adaptive Memory Grant Feedback fantastic article for more details about the tempdb spill issue. The reason for this: the memory always faster than the tempdb database because the tempdb database uses the disk resources. This mechanism is called a tempdb spill and causes performance loss. However, this consumption estimation can be wrong for a variety of reasons, and if the query requires more memory than the estimation, it uses the tempdb data. When we hover the mouse over this operator, we can see the warning details.ĭuring the execution of the query, the query optimizer calculates a required memory consumption for the query based on the estimated row numbers and row size. On the other hand, a warning sign is seen on the Sort operator, and it indicates something does not go well for this operator. To overcome this issue, we can disable or remove the index before executing the update query. In particular, we should consider this problem if we will update a large number of rows. As a result, if the updated columns are being used by the indexes, like this, for example, the query performance might be affected negatively. We have seen this obvious performance difference between the same query because of index usage on the updated columns. The Index Update and Sort operators consume 74% cost of the execution plan. The following execution plan is demonstrating an execution plan of the same query, but this query was completed within 130 seconds because of the added index, unlike the first one. We added a non-clustered index on Persons table before to update and the added index involves the PersonCityName and PersonPostCode columns as the index key. This query was completed within 68 seconds.

The only difference is that this query updated the 3.000.000 rows of the Persons table. The following execution plan illustrates an execution plan of the previous query. Particularly, if we are working on the performance of the update query, we should take into account of this probability. Indexes are very helpful database objects to improve query performance in SQL Server.
