Constant Scan in Execution Plans
I see a lot of searches from people apparently trying to find out what having a Constant Scan in their execution plan means. I can understand why. Here's the definition from the Books Online: The Constant Scan operator introduces one or more constant rows into a query. A Compute Scalar operator is often used to add columns to a row produced by a Constant Scan operator. OK. Very precise and yet, unless you know what the sentence means, reading it can be pretty confusing. The key is to see what Compute Scalar means: The Compute Scalar operator evaluates an expression to produce a computed scalar value. This may then be returned to the user, referenced elsewhere in the query, or both. An example of both is in a filter predicate…