Nested iteration message

Nested Iteration.

This message indicates one or more loops through a table to return rows. Even the simplest access to a single table is an iteration, as shown here:

select * from publishers
QUERY PLAN FOR STATEMENT 1 (at line 1).

    STEP 1
        The type of query is SELECT.

        FROM TABLE
            publishers
        Nested iteration.
        Table Scan.
        Forward scan.
        Positioning at start of table.
        Using I/O Size 2 Kbytes for data pages.
        With LRU Buffer Replacement Strategy for data pages.

For queries that perform nested-loop joins, access to each table is nested within the scan of the outer table.

See “Nested-Loop Joins” on page 128 for more information.