How does MS SQL Server decide when it can use "Parallelism" when executing queries? How does MS SQL Server decide when it can use "Parallelism" when executing queries? I recently posted another question here that, when looking at the actual execution plan used parallelism when I had an order by on the query and did not when I didn't have the order by. So, I'm wondering how it figures out when it can use "Parallelism" and when it can't.
SQL Server makes this decision based upon cost. If you execute 'sp_configure' (make sure advanced options are enabled) you will see an entry for 'cost threshold for parallelism'. If the optimizer estimates the cost to be greater than the run_value then your query will be executed in parallel. 

If the ORDER BY clause in your example results in an increased cost, then the query will go parallel.