I quite often find myself using a subselect to get some metadata key value to use as part of a where clause. Some thing like the following:
select * from product where producttype_fkey=(select producttype_key from ProductType where TypeId='TEST')
I had been under the impression that the database engine would be clever enough to work out that the value the subselect returned was constant and that it would simply work in an equivalent way to this query:
declare @prodType int;
select @prodtype=producttype_key from ProductType where TypeId='TEST';
select * from product where producttype_fkey=@prodType

Infact this is not the case. The first query ends running as though the product table and the productType table were being inner joined together, giving an execution plan like this:
Execution Plan: select * from product where producttype_fkey=(select producttype_key from ProductType where TypeId='TEST')

The second query (using the variable) has two parts to its execution, however the join is no longer there:
q2.gif

The significant thing about this is that when these two types of query are run together, the first query accounts for almost 60% of the execution, where as the two stage with variable version only accounts for a little over 40%, so it is significantly better to select the value out into a variable rather than subselecting (especially where the same value is required multiple times in a stored procedure.