One definition of leverage is "the use of a small initial investment, credit, or borrowed funds to gain a very high return in relation to one's investment, to control a much larger investment, or to reduce one's own liability for any loss." (Courtesy Dictionary.Com).
In programming, the smallest change we can make is a single bit. The next smallest change and the one we can make most effectively in human-readable source code is a single character. This story is how changing one character in a 300 line stored procedure removed 90% of the impact of the worst single query on...