To avoid any IF / CASE logic, I usually use this technique instead:

SIGN(Jan) + SIGN(Feb) + ...

In situations where the numbers could ever be negative, you'd need to include ABS()...

I would think so, since SQL doesn't (re)order / sort rows going into a columnstore, it loads them in the same order in which they arrive.

Thus, presumably the first 1,048,576...

Yeah, I was incorrectly thinking of column3 also matching.

I don't like having to have duplicative indexes.  I'd probably go with just:

( column2, datetime ) INCLUDE ( column3 )

Sure, that index...

I would of that the best index would be:

(Column3, Column2, DateTime)

given the WHERE condition.

Particularly if you later use the same query with:

Where tab1.Column3= 9

to query a different column.

And I'd move...

Since an IN gets converted to ... OR ... OR ..., I suppose it might make a difference, in which case you'd want to put the most common values first.

You...

Technically, if j.Grp is NULLable, I think you'd need to use:

WHERE j.Grp IS NOT NULL AND j.Code <> 'L3'

to insure the same results as the original code.

You waste space and risk ambiguity by storing dashes in a date?  Seriously?  If for some bizarre reason one insists on storing dates as char, they should be YYYYMMDD.  Unambiguous. ...

I don't really have any issue with storing cc numbers as char(16), especially since they'll need to be encrypted and end up being stored as binary anyway.  I also wouldn't...

Actually an identifier is numeric (integer) because it just makes no common sense to do otherwise.  Overly-pedantic concerns about whether it's used in math or not are actually irrelevant.  There...

Probably cleaner to check for 0 values as you INSERT the row:

INSERT INTo #a

select NULLIF(0,0),NULLIF(1,0),NULLIF(0,0),NULLIF(2,0)

union ALL

select NULLIF(0,0),NULLIF(2,0),NULLIF(0,0),NULLIF(3,0)

union ALL

select NULLIF(0,0),NULLIF(3,0),NULLIF(0,0),NULLIF(4,0)

A trigger is actually perfect for this situation.  For the email, it's probably best to add row(s) to a table or queue, then construct and send the emails based on...

It seems like it, but SQL 2008 doesn't directly read JSON, afaik.  It might be easier to handle it with T-SQL rather than try to create some external function/process.

yyyy-mm-00 is not an interval either.  The interval would be yyyy-mm-01 to yyyy-mm-{EOM}.

yyyy-mm-00 sorta looks like a date, but it is not one, no matter how much fluff you put...

Limited sample data, but I think this should perform better, since it avoids all the CHARINDEX costs:

SELECT   A.ID, B.ItemNumber,
    MAX(CASE WHEN D.Item...

The disadvantage is that it violates 1NF big time.  A "date" such as yyyy-mm-00 is not a date it is multiple dates.  Thus, it violates 1NF.

Besides which, SQL Server does...