As you have seen throughout the book, query tuning isn’t easy. Microsoft has recognized this and has introduced a large number of automatic performance enhancements into SQL Server over the last four versions. These are all mechanisms to attempt to deal with common query performance issues without forcing people to rewrite their code or restructure their databases. There are many ways that Microsoft can use the internals of the engine to deal with what would have been in the past problematic code. In this chapter, I’ll be covering