Jeff,
The following thought occurred to me last night but I didn't get a chance to test it until this morning.
Isn't the modulo function designed to always return a positive integer?
Hence, in this part of your data generator, I don't believe you need to use ABS:
SomeRandomInteger = CHECKSUM(NEWID()) % @Range + @StartValue
I didn't try it for a million rows but the first 200 came up all as positives.
My thought question: Have you ever been told that your query runs too fast?
My advice:
INDEXing a poor-performing query is like putting sugar on cat food. Yeah, it probably tastes better but are you sure you want to eat it?
The path of least resistance can be a slippery slope. Take care that fixing your fixes of fixes doesn't snowball and end up costing you more than fixing the root cause would have in the first place.
Need to UNPIVOT? Why not CROSS APPLY VALUES instead?[/url]
Since random numbers are too important to be left to chance, let's generate some![/url]
Learn to understand recursive CTEs by example.[/url]
[url url=http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/St