[101008]

I remember when I studied databases in college, the execution plan took care of what to do first: join, filters, etc (I remember doing excercises with paper and pen where I got a query, a few tables, and I had to build the optimal execution tree).

So this product is not only expensive, but I have to think of the execution plan myself? Or I am wrong and modern dbs don't do that?

[blandcoffee]

I've understood it to be a bit more nuanced than that. If you were to perform two queries:

Query 1 -> join Table A with Table B, both have 1M records

Query 2 -> Filter Table A to 10k records, then join Table A with Table B (1M records)

I would expect Query 2 to execute faster - I don't think the exec plan would've optimized Query 1 equivalently.