In the previous post I've demonstrated an unexpected Nested Loop Join caused by an extreme data distribution. Although unexpected at first sight, the performance of the execution plan selected by the optimizer is decent - provided the estimates are in the right ballpark.Here is another case of an unexpected execution plan, this time about Merge Joins.
Merge Joins
In order to appreciate why the execution plan encountered is unexpected, first a quick summary about how Merge Joins work:A Merge Join is essentially a Nested Loop operation from one sorted row source into another sorted row source.