Great article. Thanks for all the work. While I was aware that avoiding implicit converts resulted in better query plans, I didn't know about the data precedence. That's a great piece of information the next time (and there will be one) I have the same issue (read: argument) with a developer who can't seem to understand why the crazy dba's want you to explicitly declare the correct data types in stored procedures instead of using strings for everything (because, after all, strings are eaiser, aren't they? And SQL Server will just implicitly convert them, so I don't have to worry about data types...).