Parallel execution, part 2

Continuing on last week’s post on parallelism, here’s part two, where we take a closer look at when parallel plans are considered and what you can do to either force or prevent a query from running parallel as well as things you want to avoid if you’re trying to achieve a parallel query plan.

Inline variable assignment in UPDATE statements

Ok, here’s a brain-twister. Not only can you assign values to a column in an UPDATE statement using variables, but you can assign values to variables as well. It’s really not as complicated as it may sound, but there are a few trapdoors to avoid.