I really wish you'd written this article a few months ago. Our system was performing poorly, and I only stumbled across the "...N'stringValue' queries leading into skipped indexes and tables scans after logging a few days' worth of Profiler entries for reads > 12800 [10M of data]. Thanks for working out the SARG angle, I didn't get that far.

Hibernate was quickly disqualified as the stealth "Unicodifier", and we focused on JDBC. A switch was found that, when set, would stop with the Unicode conversions already... but it didn't work as advertised. We eventually moved over to jTDS, got it configured right, and once it went live our (data) Disk Utilization Percent stopped plateauing at 100% during regular business hours.

I don't know all the ins and outs of java connectivity layers, but JDBC seems to be one to avoid just now.

Philip