Most of my IT coworkers aren't even interested in improving their skills on the company nickel. They will only improve their skills if whatever old technology is permanently removed,...

And we can see earlier in this post how some people use tally from a function found on the net, because they have learned, that this is the only...

Interestingly I found that a setting of 8 (vs 6) does speed up the original slow query significantly it testing.

Perhaps it is time to increase the value due to...

A slightly different way to put it ... I'ts because SQL Server cannot actually use anything directly from Physical Reads.  It MUST be loaded into memory before it can be...

What I've found is that a lot of employees have the proverbial 9-to-5- attitude and only want to improve their skills on the company nickel and on company time.

And, if...

Most people are still using a version earlier than 2022! So just using the 2022 version to solve this problem is not the right solution - for some developers...

For me, it's very much something that MS got wrong.  They're even trying to make it so that the NULL settings are not optional and Front-Enders are ready to march...

Can you post your "tweaked" code?  Others may learn from it.

I agree... since NULL is not "nothing" nor even equal to another NULL, I don't know why they made it evaluate for NULL behind the scenes at all or why...

As expected!!!! On my desk it takes only 14 seconds to process 131,000 rows. Hardly not a statement that will be executed several times every minute or several times...

The problem is documented (well, kind of) in the Microsoft Documentation.  They "cop" out on explaining exactly what could happen by "only" saying that having a NULL in the object...

I'll also tell you to never just up and delete a table.  Instead, rename it and see if the proverbial phone rings.  The job you save will be your own.

After...

@carsten.saastamoinen

That "split" contains an incremental recursive CTE and it's going to be absolutely terrible for performance.  See here...

https://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/hidden-rbar-counting-with-recursive-ctes

Wow these are awesome replies and super helpful thank you both so much.  It has existed for some time but it stored encrypted data then uses a decryptkey with...

How deep does identical data occur from the left side of the VARBINARY(MAX)?  You might be able to speed things up a bit by sorting, say, only the left 50...