That's really slick Drew - well done!!  😎

There is no concern whatsoever for insert trigger performance for your situation, as long as you aren't doing table scans on massive tables do to the joins or get the...

I have worked on numerous SQL Server systems with > ten thousand queries per second (on STANDARD edition), and one system, also Standard, that would occasionally touch over 100K/sec.

Always set up a profiler trace when applications exhibit wierd behavior. That will be telling I suspect.

Oh, did you check the SQL Server error log for anything...

If the data is actually stored as datetime, I think datepart(hour) is the way to go. If it IS actually stored as varchar(23) then just do a substring to pull...

I've consulted on SQL Server for over 2 decades for scores of clients ranging from Mom-and-Pops to Fortune 100 and guess what, they ALL produce crappy designs and crappy code...

The most important thing you said there Drew was "...should be...". But sadly they aren't. Probably 99% of all columns I have ever seen in SQL Server applications (25 years...

Do you have a link for the ghost record creation for keeping track of the uniquefier value? I thought I had one but cannot find it.

Don't have time to give this much thought this morning but I must get one VERY important point out: I would NOT rely on auto-update stats to handle this particular...

search web for sql server in-memory oltp checkpoint files. You could do garbage collection or memory management too instead of checkpoint files. 

If you do a lot of DML...