We have TABLE A partitioned by date and does not contain data from today, it only contains data from prior day and going to year to date.
We have TABLE B also partitioned by date which does contain data from today as well as data from prior day going to year to date. On top of TABLE B there is a view, View_B which joins against View_C, View_D and left outer joins Table E. View_C and View_D are each selects from 1 table and do not have any other tables joined in. So View_B looks something like
SELECT b.Foo, c.cItem, d.dItem, E.eItem
FROM TABLE_B b JOIN View_C c on c.cItem = b.cItem
JOIN View_D d on b.dItem = d.dItem
LEFT OUTER JOIN TABLE_E on b.eItem = e.eItem
View_AB joins TABLE A and View_B on extract date as well as one other constraint. So it looks something like:
SELECT a.Col_1, b.Col_2, ...
FROM TABLE_A a LEFT OUTER JOIN View_B b
on a.ExtractDate = b.ExtractDate and a.Foo=b.Foo
-- no where clause
When searching for data from anything other than prior day, the query analyzer does what would be expected and does a hash match join to complete the outer join and reads about 116 pages worth of data from table B. If run for prior day however, the query optimizer freaks out and uses a nested join, scans the table 7000+ times and reads 8,000,000+ pages in the join.
We can fake it/force it to use a different query plan by using join hints, however that causes any constraints in the view that look at table B to cause the optimizer to throw an error that the query can't be completed due to join hints.
Editing to add that the pages/scans = the same number as is hit in one scan when run for a prior day where the optimizer correctly chooses a hash instead of nested join.
As mentioned in the comments, we have severely reduced the impact by creating a covered index on TABLE_B to cover the join in View_B but the IO is still higher than it would be if the optimizer chose the correct plan, especially since the index is essentially redundant for all but prior day searches.
The sqlplan is at http://pastebin.com/m53789da9, sorry that it's not the nicely formatted version.