Why Does My Query Timeout Unless Force Join To Hash Join?

I'm using SQL Server 2005.



A piece of software I wrote starting timing out on a query that left outer joins a table to a view. Both the table and view have approximately the same number of rows (about 170000).



The table has 2 very similar columns, one is a varchar(1) and another is varchar(100). Neither are included in any index and beyond the size difference, the columns have the same properties. One of the employees here uses the varchar(1) column (called miscsearch) to tag large sets of rows to perform some action on. In this case, he had set 9000 rows miscsearch value to "g". The query then should join the table and view for all rows where miscsearch is set to g in the table. This query takes at least 20 minutes to run (I stopped it at this point).

If I remove the "where" clause and join all rows in the two tables, the query completes in about 20 seconds. If set the varchar(100) column (called descrip) to "g" for the same rows set via miscsearch, the query completes in about 20 seconds.



If I force the join type to a hash join, the query completes using miscsearch in about 30 seconds.



So, this works:

SELECT di.File_No, prevPlacements, balance,'NOT PLACED' as status FROM Info di LEFT OUTER HASH JOIN View_PP pp ON di.ram_file_no = pp.file_no WHERE miscsearch = 'g' ORDER BY balance DESC



and this works:

SELECT di.File_No, prevPlacements, balance,'NOT PLACED' as status FROM Info di LEFT OUTER JOIN View_PP pp ON di.ram_file_no = pp.file_no WHERE descrip = 'g' ORDER BY balance DESC



But this does't:

SELECT di.File_No, prevPlacements, balance,'NOT PLACED' as status FROM Info di LEFT OUTER JOIN View_PP pp ON di.ram_file_no = pp.file_no WHERE miscsearch = 'g' ORDER BY balance DESC



What should I be looking for here to understand why this is happening?



Thanks,

john