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How does MS SQL Server decide when it can use "Parallelism" when executing queries? I recently posted another question here that, when looking at the actual execution plan used parallelism when I had an order by on the query and did not when I didn't have the order by. So, I'm wondering how it figures out when it can use "Parallelism" and when it can't.

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SQL Server makes this decision based upon cost. If you execute 'sp_configure' (make sure advanced options are enabled) you will see an entry for 'cost threshold for parallelism'. If the optimizer estimates the cost to be greater than the run_value then your query will be executed in parallel.

If the ORDER BY clause in your example results in an increased cost, then the query will go parallel.

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Very interesting, thanks. – BitOff Jan 18 '11 at 0:29
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You can find more info about the cost calculated for parallelism here: msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms178065.aspx and here technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd320292.aspx . – Marian Jan 18 '11 at 18:15

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