Lena leaned back. The plastic wheels of her chair squeaked. For a moment, she just stared at the Results pane: the exact same data the finance team needed for their Monday report, but delivered like a sigh instead of a scream.

Before closing SSMS, she opened the Activity Monitor one last time. The CPU graph, once a frantic seismograph during the report’s runtime, now lay flat and calm. All was well in the realm of the relational engine.

She rewrote the main procedure to use the new function. Another F5 . This time, the query finished in 0.3 seconds instead of 47. She ran SET STATISTICS TIME ON in a separate tab, just to watch the numbers tumble. Logical reads dropped from 18,000 to 400.

Her cursor hovered over the button—the red exclamation mark icon she’d clicked a million times. But this time, it felt different. Not like running code. Like performing surgery.

She saved the script as Fix_SlowReport_vFinal_ActuallyFinal.sql . Then, for good measure, she added a comment at the top: