"if serializable is the correct level of locking and concurrency why haven't DBMS / TMS providers been able to implement it yet without impacting throughput? After all, with faster processors...

"If the stakeholders make an informed decision that approximate is suitable for their purposes, everything you say is acceptable."

Agreed. Often, summary reporting only needs to be approximate.  It's important to...

Question: If a have a table with many rows of data in it, then drop a column.  Then I do various data updates in the middle of the table that...

Wow!  Ingenious.

It's surprising that DECOMPRESS(..) and COMPRESS(..) work with true gzip files (rather than a raw stream from the deflate algorithm) but then I suppose anyone wanting compressed storage for...

Presumably, future inserts (after the column is dropped) won't consume use space for the deleted column, though?

Also, question, if a page is rewritten (e.g., due to a normal insert or...

How much of the speed up was due to the shift to a table variable and how much due to removing cursors? It would be interesting if you would...