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

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