A reader posted a question for Office Hours:
Hi Brent, What is your take on Hugo Kornelis’s explanation of execution plan naming. As her his explanation, estimated exec plan is simply an execution plan whereas actual execution plan = execution plan+run-time stats. Do you agree that the naming is flawed and confusing? – Yourbiggestfan
I like Hugo a lot – brilliant fella, and he knows way more than I do about execution plans – but he’s wrong on this one. Estimated and actual plans don’t always have the same shape.
I’ll use the training version of the Stack Overflow database, but