How does a database execute a statement?

Obviously, don't expect alot of detail here; we'll only examine the aspects important to this article. When a database receives a statement, the database engine first parses the statement and looks for syntax errors. Once the statement is parsed, the database needs to figure out the most efficient way to execute the statement. This can be computationally quite expensive. The database checks what indexes, if any, can help, or whether it should do a full read of all rows in a table. Databases use statistics on the data to figure out what is the best way. Once the query plan is created then it can be executed by the database engine.

It takes CPU power to do the access plan generation. Ideally, if we send the same statement to the database twice, then we'd like the database to reuse the access plan for the first statement. This uses less CPU than if it regenerated the plan a second time.