I remain where I was. Any of the hints can be useful in a given situation. My primary issue is when people see it as a general fix or best practice for lots of places or even everywhere. I've seen it done with various hints, NOLOCK, FAST N, KEEP FIXED PLAN... Every one one of them appeared to "fix" the underlying problem, bad code, bad indexing, bad table design, in the short term. Every one of them, when applied universally, proved to be extremely costly in the long run. NOLOCK starts returning bad data. Duplicate rows, in any system, are an issue. As are missing rows. Both these can be cased by NOLOCK. It's not just a question of getting 'NY' instead of 'New York' because an update is in progress.