Randy,

This is a great article on a difficult subject, and you have explained it well. IMHO however, it seems that a discussion on table/column/index statistics and the influence they play on the optimizer (or even a mention) was missing.... I come from the Oracle world and the optimizer is a favorite subject (see http://www.ioug.org/select/articles/05q2/index.cfm for an article I wrote).

Regards,

John Kanagaraj