Slicing up problems with temp tables really helps with performance. And you've identified ways to improve upon that basic approach by narrowing the number of columns and filtering the rows.

I was surprised that you failed to mention a more effective method of improving performance without the penalties caused by temp tables - Table Variables. Table Variables are more performant than temp tables because they don't use tempdb. I regularly replace the use of temp tables with table variables when maintaining code. And have recently discovered they can be returned from Functions.

Thanks for the article, temp tables are better than cursors and they can improve performance.