Use them all the time now.  With SQL I design primarily OLAP databases.  For the designs over which I have complete control, the schemas for the tables identify the source...

Thank you for bringing this to our attention.  This doesn't make it easy, but it is certainly easier.

That's good.  A testament to good testing as well as good development.  But that doesn't...

Different clients have different setups. But one for which I do the most development set up a very consistent Dev and Prod environment and it makes things so much easier. ...

I'm suggesting that you don't need to ignore performance for the sake of accuracy and...

A further word on speed.  I have taken ETL processes that previously took hours and by redesigning them made them much faster.  Recently I took another one that was taking...

And that takes some serious design work. ...

Heh... performance is second only to accuracy so I'll have to disagree with the notion that...

This has been the standard in data warehouse design since the mid-nineties...

What are you trying to do?  STARTTIME is already a datetime.  Why are you casting it as a datetime?

I've lost those battles before only to...

I would still caution that too many "it depends" becomes "I'll do it like I want without understanding why the best practice is the best practice."  Just an observation that...

I should have sad doesn't prove anything relevant to the original post.

I mean that it will usually be impossible to tell whether Table C is joining to the initial state of A or joining to the results of joining A...