The short text plan is useful when you want to compare plans quickly. It provides the least amount of information of all the plan formats, but it provides it on a single line.

In the following example, the plan starts with Work[Sort because the ORDER BY clause causes the entire result set to be sorted. The Customers table is accessed by its primary key index, CustomersKey. An index scan is used to satisfy the search condition because the column Customers.ID is a primary key. The abbreviation JNL indicates that the optimizer chose a merge join to process the join between Customers and SalesOrders. Finally, the SalesOrders table is accessed using the foreign key index FK_CustomerID_ID to find rows where CustomerID is less than 100 in the Customers table.

SELECT EXPLANATION ('SELECT GivenName, Surname, OrderDate
FROM Customers JOIN SalesOrders
WHERE CustomerID < 100
ORDER BY OrderDate');

Work[ Sort[ Customers<CustomersKey> JNL SalesOrders<FK_CustomerID_ID> ] ]

For more information about code words used in the plan, see Execution plan abbreviations.

Colons separate join strategies

The following command contains two query blocks: the outer select block referencing the SalesOrders and SalesOrderItems tables, and the subquery that selects from the Products table.

SELECT EXPLANATION ('SELECT *
FROM SalesOrders AS o
   KEY JOIN SalesOrderItems AS I
WHERE EXISTS
   (  SELECT *
      FROM Products p
      WHERE p.ID = 300 )');

o<seq> JNL i<FK_ID_ID> : p<ProductsKey>

Colons separate join strategies of the different query blocks. Short plans always list the join strategy for the main block first. Join strategies for other query blocks follow. The order of join strategies for these other query blocks may not correspond to the order of the query blocks in your statement, or to the order in which they execute.

For more information about the abbreviations used in a plan, see Execution plan abbreviations.