I'd say you get a slight gain by disabling the non-clus indexes first.  That's because disabling the index requires removing the rows, which requires some minor logging (of page deallocations,...

Or just:


SELECT LEFT(OrigDateString, 4) + ' Q' + CAST((CAST(SUBSTRING(OrigDateString, 6, 2) AS tinyint) + 2) / 3 AS varchar(1))
FROM #TestData

Columns lengths have another effect on memory allocation as well.  SQL reserves memory prior to processing a table.  It determines the amount of memory to reserve partly based on column...

Or:

select *
from lineitems
where orderid in (select orderid from orders where customerid = @CustomerID)

I think it's very possible that o.type = 'U' would speed it up, rather than using OBJECTPROPERTY.

Move the error details to a different table.  That table could be keyed by the clustering key of this table plus perhaps a sequential error number.

This table should...

There's a fundamental difference between those queries.
The first is an INNER join to dept, obviously, as explicitly stated, whereas the second is a LEFT OUTER JOIN, although only implicitly.

IF OBJECT_ID('tempdb.dbo.#index_info') IS NOT NULL
    DROP TABLE #index_info;

SELECT TOP (0)
dbschemas.[name] AS schema_name,db_name() AS db_name,
dbtables.[name] AS table_name ,
dbindexes.[name] AS index_name ,

Along similar lines, I've noticed that many brokerage firms use decimal places for fractional stock holdings, although they display only 3 or 4.  Thus, it's often impossible to get an...

I don't think this is really an issue, as a practical matter.  Interest is computed daily, down to the cent (or, worst case, to hundredths of cents), how much the interest is....