>Quite possibly, yes.
>
>One thing...on % cost for the execution operators....those are estimates and not exact values.
>
>You might want to look at Time and IO statistics.
>
>If you do this...
>
>SET STATISTICS IO ON
>SET STATISTICS TIME ON
>
>And then run the query, in the messages area you'll get some good numbers to measure.
>
>Any evaluation of execution operator cost %s should also be followed by an evaluation of the actual IO and time statistics.

Thanks, this is good to know. For now, the hardcoding sequence of the WHERE clause works fine and highly performing. But, knowing EXISTS could be considered is good to know.