• The one place where I frequently use with (nolock) is in our datawarehousing ETLs - I KNOW that nothing else is hitting my staging database while my ETL is loading - I'm writing, then I'm reading.

    If anything else is hitting the database, I have bigger problems.

    Also MAXDOP - theoretically SQL knows best, but I've come across many instances where the parallelisation that it performs is nowhere near optimal.