I have to disagree with the answer here.  If you run the code more than once, it comes up with the same 10 rows.  Therefor, they are NOT "random rows"....

Totally understood and I was just answering the new question.

Just to say it again, there is no...

Now that, I agree with!

A lot of people immediately respond with "Well, just turn on RCSI".  Folks really need to be careful...

Jeff. I'll take a crack at your question:

In your example, are you assuming the date column is indexed and would be used?  What if that is not the case,...

Agreed... all you have to do there is accept an extra 14 bytes per row and extra usage of TempDB.  Since...

On what grounds? 

Uh, because the data is right, and the implementation is right.

You set up a straw man, where this condition applies, and you don't care about this,...

The responses are as expected... some hardcore "NEVER"s.

To those people, I ask, if you want a simple report, say the number of products purchased by day for the previous calendar...

With regard to the following code from the article...

CREATE PROCEDURE dbo.GetDashboardStats
AS
BEGIN
SET TRANSACTION ISOLATION LEVEL READ UNCOMMITTED
SELECT 
(SELECT COUNT(*) FROM Orders WITH (NOLOCK) 
WHERE OrderDate = CAST(GETDATE() AS...

It's gotten to the point where I evaluate changes by determining how much harm the change causes or how little a required change brings to the table compared to the...

Just do a test.

SET STATISTICS TIME,IO ON:
Put code to be tested here.
SET STATISTICS TIME,IO OFF:

Do NOT use this method if any functions that contain the word BEGIN...

Using YEAR and MONTH Functions:

I'm going to seriously recommend NOT doing it that way.  Use the Date Range method, instead.

You do realize that the addition of the new index requires space that might not have been available and that dropping the first NCI made a bunch of space available,...

EDIT: Looks like Steve posted while I was working on replies.  Leaving this reply here even though it overlaps with Steve's pose.

FOR and AFTER are identical in meaning.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/t-sql/statements/create-trigger-transact-sql#arguments

You're trigger is...

From the article:

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And most people rarely upgrade their OSS. They get something that works and don't want to change. I get that, as I feel the same way...

You can simplify the WHERE clause in AlphaNumericOnly and AlphaOnly by taking advantage of the fact that upper and lower case letters differ only by the 6th bit, which...