I'm sure I will receive much abuse for this post, but I'm going to share my thoughts anyway because I am a big fan of SQLServer Central and I care about the quality, accuracy and relevancy of the content on this site.

That being said, I found this article extremely disappointing on many levels. First off, as has been mentioned already, the operator precedence applied, as well as the corresponding result, are identical for the expressions (X * Y) / Z and X*Y/Z.

Second, as the author mentions, SQL is built upon set theory and the performance of set based operations dramaticaly outperforms sequential operations, which is why I can't understand why the artical is demonstrating alternatives to set-based solutions when a real-world premise for doing so hasn't even been provided.

Last, there are several set-based operations that can accomplish sophisticated updates (like using ROWCOUNT) that numerous prior articles on this very site have identified. So, as I said, I am very disappointed with this article and fail to see how it is relevant (or helpful) at all to SQL programmers new and old.

Am I missing something here?