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For some types of queries, such as those that require the results to be ordered or displayed in groups, the SQL Server query optimizer may determine that it is necessary to create its own temporary worktable. The worktable is used to hold the intermediate results of the query, at which time the result rows can be ordered or grouped, and then the final results selected from that worktable. When all results have been returned, the worktable is automatically dropped. The worktables are always created in the Tempdb database, so it is possible that the system administrator may have to increase the size of Tempdb to accommodate the queries that require very large worktables. Since the query optimizer creates these worktables for its own internal use, the names of the worktables will not be listed in the tempdb..sysobjects table.

Worktables will always need to be used when a query contains a GROUP BY clause. For queries involving ORDER BY, it is possible that the ordering can be done without the use of the worktable. If there is a clustered index on the column(s) in the ORDER BY clause, the optimizer knows that the rows are already stored in sorted order, so a sort in a worktable is not necessary (although there are exceptions to this, depending on the sort order that is installed on the server). Since the data is not stored in sorted order for nonclustered indexes, the worktable will not be necessary if the cheapest access plan is by using the nonclustered index. However, if the optimizer determines that scanning the entire table will require fewer I/Os than using the nonclustered index, then a worktable will need to be created for the ordering of the results.

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