Maybe it's just Microsoft's SQL server, but I've come to become extremely suspicious of this. I've run into far too many cases where, despite our DBA playing w

Maybe it's just Microsoft's SQL server, but I've come to become extremely suspicious of this. I've run into far too many cases where, despite our DBA playing with cache-clearing strategy and statistics and the like, we found that queries would run fine in the unparameterized query-console and would run with pathological performance in the actual application. Every time it's "hey mr senior developer, I'm trying to reproduce that slow query but I can't, even though I'm doing the same thing as the application" and I'm like "you must be doing something wrong" and sure enough: no, it's the SQL server doing something wrong. And every time we found out "oh, running it un-parameterized makes it fast". So then I have to talk down the juniors who are like "well fine, I can fix it by running it unparameterized, let's just do that!". So then we have to figure out how to trick it to generating a non-idiotic query plan without abandoning the security that parameterization provides. ... basically I'm deep into "the emperor has no clothes" on MS SQL server in general.