The right SQL goes a long way

I got a query from a customer this week that was taking a long time to run. <br/><br/> When I first looked at the query my first thought was that the indexes were wrong, or just the joins across 4 tables were killing the performance. But almost all of the lookup tables were really simple value lookups. <br /><br />The submitted query took 1 minute 55 seconds on my machine with his data. After rewriting the query, and adding a few indexes I was able to get it to run in 0.86 seconds. That is an AMAZING performance change ...