From reading what you wrote, what I think you are talking about is statement caching where it can cache the "how do I run this" but still has to read each row (

From reading what you wrote, what I think you are talking about is statement caching where it can cache the "how do I run this" but still has to read each row (or indexed row) from the buffer cache. The mysql query cache actually caches the results of the query, see https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/query-cache.html https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/query-cache.html so it doesn't even need to look at the rows at all. SQL Server may have a similar thing now, I'm not up to date on it, but wanted to call out the distinction based on how you described it. No question, SQL Server has a lot of awesome qualities for the right use case and has come a long long way since the Sybase days.