Thanx for sharing my conundrum. Do you know any good place to ask this question? Like some MS forum which is used my the developers?

Thanx from me too. Maybe you could post in in the scripts section? I am quite sure others will profit from it's use...

//Hanslindgren

Thanx for understanding

'Increase performance'... Yes, if you do not actually access the text that the 16 byte pointers are pointing to. That actually degrades your performance...

... and DBs are usually built for speed and performance and not only for convenience of DB developers. So what you (Jeff Gray) save in...

Well.. It depends

If you do testing you will see that sometimes temp tables are faster and sometimes temp variables are faster. They both...

True, best not to do. And best not to do it many times

Reading  http://www.sqlservercentral.com/forums/shwmessage.aspx?forumid=8&messageid=181099 made me want to specify that it is probably better to...

I'll just settle for this one:

Well, hmm. You could run Profiler at all times. But I guess it also counts as running query.

Or you can do a script that executes sp_who/sp_who2 and automatically runs DBCC...

You could bake your own script using the undocumented SPs 'sp_MSforeachdb', 'sp_MSforeachtable' and from there construct and execute a select, for every table in every database, with a WHERE clause, on the columns that...

Yeah, I guess you are right. Though the idea might be interesting to consider. An aditional table would be perfect if you could rely 100% on the SQL Servers ability...

This was one of the best QODs/Answers so far!!

Not ambigous and shows the problematics with short questions/answers. It just simply cannot be answerd in any other way based on such a limited...

Hmm. What about performance? Say your data is always close to 8000 chars and you access it very seldomly. Would it not make sense to make it a text (not in-row) to improve...

But the Oracle way of optimizing performance without rewriting the client application can be useful. Though I havn't had any practical use for it yet either

Yeah, I guess you are right.  Though it means creating a computed column and using it. One benefit in Oracle is that you can examine the queries executed and to tune them, you...