I've always resisted responding to articles with obvious errors simply not wanting to get into arguments about which way to skin the cat. I hope people who read the original articles here also read all the comments and replies. I hear and see too many junior (and some not so junior) read articles then start using the techniques as THE way to do something.

I can spot several things I would change with a lot of the reply scripts. I won't list those right now because I think the most important thing for readers who visit here to know is that they MUST try different techniques and record the results so that they know which technique solves their problem best for them. They must decide on what trade-offs they can risk and which they can't.

Whenever I write an SP, USP, script, or even a TRIGGER, I comment exactly what I did and also comment exactly what alternate methods I used and why I chose the solution I did (for instance, why I chose a table variable over a temp table (or vice versa) or why I chose a cursor over a while loop). If you have several developers or DBAs who could be maintaining the code, this will help them understand your methods and may save them some time down the road.