Ever had a user accidentally create a query that resulted in a Cartesian product of your two largest tables? Of course, a badly written query uses up precious CPU and I/O cycles and therefore slows everyone down. With the advent of SQL Server 7, you can specify a maximum cost for a query. You can do this in two ways. First, set a maximum cost for all queries on your server by setting the configuration option “query governor cost limit” to the maximum number of seconds allowed for a query. (For those of you not familiar with the sp_configure command, this can be done through Enterprise Manager by right clicking on a Server, choosing Properties, clicking the Server setting tab, and choosing the “Use query governor