Risk vs. reward is always a difficult subject, and not always about having the best information or making the best decision.  Sometimes you just get lucky or unlucky.

Take the example...

I use a slightly different method for the last day of the month:

select
        dateadd(mm,datediff(mm,0,a.Date),0)     as FirstDayOfMonth,
        dateadd(mm,datediff(mm,-1,a.Date),-1)   as LastDayOfMonth,
        dateadd(mm,datediff(mm,0,a.Date)+1,0)   as FirstDayOfNextMonth
from
       ( select Date = getdate() ) a

-- Get Primary keys
select
 *
from
 INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLE_CONSTRAINTS a
where
 CONSTRAINT_TYPE = 'PRIMARY KEY'

-- Get Foreign Keys
select *
from
 INFORMATION_SCHEMA.REFERENTIAL_CONSTRAINTS a

-- PK/FK matches
select distinct
 PK_TABLE = 
 b.TABLE_SCHEMA+'.'+b.TABLE_NAME,
 FK_TABLE = 
 c.TABLE_SCHEMA+'.'+c.TABLE_NAME
from
 INFORMATION_SCHEMA.REFERENTIAL_CONSTRAINTS a
 join
 INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLE_CONSTRAINTS b
 on
 a.CONSTRAINT_SCHEMA = b.CONSTRAINT_SCHEMA and
 a.UNIQUE_CONSTRAINT_NAME = b.CONSTRAINT_NAME
 join
 INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLE_CONSTRAINTS c
 on
 a.CONSTRAINT_SCHEMA = c.CONSTRAINT_SCHEMA and
 a.CONSTRAINT_NAME =...

I think you have to start with the business requirement and ask:

“Is partial information of any value?  Does year alone have any value?  Does year and month have any value? ...

As I stated in my post:

"I think it is equally valid to say that you should compare on an equal cost basis to see which gives the best IO performance...

Can you offer any proof for this statement:

"A single disk suffers a 75% degredation on io performance on raid 5 compared to raid 10 ( or raid 1 ) for...

Jeff, I think your tests may have taken advantage of having master.dbo.syscolumns in cache, something that may or may not be the case.  Also, one was loading a temp table...

There is also DBCC

DBCC SHRINKFILE (DataFil1, 7)

Don't forget BACKUP.

BACKUP DATABASE MyNwind

   FILE = 'MyNwind_data_1',

   FILEGROUP = 'new_customers',

   FILE = 'MyNwind_data_2',

   FILEGROUP = 'first_qtr_sales'

   TO MyNwind_1

If the tables were properly designed, there would be no need for this thread.

If anyone is interested, I ran performance tests of the 2 methods from my prior post, and posted the results on the link below.

MIN/MAX Across Multiple Columns

http://www.sqlteam.com/forums/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=86906

I wrote the function on the code below to quickly generate number tables.

It executed this code to load a table with 1,000,000 numbers in 6.780 seconds.  When I ran it...

I wrote the function in the code below to quickly generate number tables.

It executed this code to load a table with 1,000,000 numbers in 6.780 seconds.  When I ran it to...

I think the wording in the article may be wrong.

It should say that the fill factor should be LOWERED, for example from 95% to 70%.

You said "I still think there are better ways to do this than your above example".  You didn't provide the example of something that would duplicate the function of F_TABLE_NUMBER_RANGE from my...