Well, Frank, I've heard of sitting on the fence but it looks like you've jumped it and half way across the field.

Can...

Scalar UDF's like this are performance killers on larger tables.

Compare the results of doing this with a UDF and a single SELECT statement. They should speak for themselves. While...

Close, FILLFACTOR apply to both kind of indexes no matter if index page = index page or index page = data page. See, if this helps:

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/columnists/gjackson/whocaresaboutfillfactor.asp

I have always tended to use IDENTITY because I can guarantee uniqueness

I'm sure you meant this implicitely, but, being maybe picky, the IDENTITY property alone does *not* guarantee uniqueness.

You...

BINARY_CHECKSUM() *can* be tricky at times when comparing only strings. Consider this from SQL Server MVP Adam Machanic:

select binary_checksum('a                b               c')

select binary_checksum('ab               c')

It is my understanding that Clustered Indexes *do not have* index pages at the leaf level (you can find there the data pages instead), but Clustered Indexes *do have* index...

See, if this helps:

http://www.karaszi.com/sqlserver/info_datetime.asp

FWIW, see, if this provides additional insight

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/sql/2000/all/reskit/en-us/part3/c1161.mspx

Again, echoing partially Julian

1) You have to wait until the next version of SQL Server which should introduce a DATE datatype. Currently a...

I tend to agree with Julian. It looks as you can use INT (or BIGINT) for the 1st set and DECIMAL for the 2nd set. But first of all, what...

So, you apparently know Joe Celko's opinion on this topic.

Well, personally I think there is much truth in it. IMO, even better, is a phrase by Ron Soukup, who...

See, if this helps:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;314546

Dealing with BLOB data is a royal pain at time when you only use SQL Server's built-in functionality. Just like you did, it is much better to do this in...

How are you reading the data?

What is your front-end?

Okay, just some quick thoughts:

- Referential Integrity:

When you don't define relationships at the lowest level, but rather in a sp, they can be bypassed when someone doesn't use the...