Really interesting and well-written article, thank you.

As a matter of interest, is it any faster (or in any other way better or worse) to create the hash value as part of the T-SQL Select statement, using code based on something like this:

[font="Courier New"]SELECT HashBytes('MD5', FirstName + LastName) FROM [AdventureWorks].[Person].[Contact][/font]

Of course you will have to use all the fields that you will be hashing on, and cast all values to (n)varchar, but I wondered if you had tried this, and if so, which appraoch gave better performance?