My colleague found that some queries on Teradata are improved by Short-circuit evaluation . This is common knowledge among software engineers, but DBA may not know it. I knew it short circuit, but I didn't know it is effective to sql. For example, following query seems not bad and you may think everything is ok. (Please forget 'like any' since it is rewritten internally) SELECT * FROM t1 WHERE c1 LIKE '%a0001%' OR c1 LIKE '%a0002%' OR c1 LIKE %a0003%' ... OR c1 LIKE '%a9999%' ; By using short circuit, this query can be rewritten like this. SELECT * FROM t1 WHERE c1 LIKE '%a%' and ( c1 LIKE '%a0001%' OR c1 LIKE '%a0002%' OR c1 LIKE '%a0003%' ... OR c1 LIKE '%a9999%' ) ; Of course, this rewrite isn't effective for all situations. It depends on the data character...