First of all, thank you for you reply, Paul.

Very informative and precise, as usual.

I forgot to mention that I ran these tests on my dev server (8 dual core...

I know I will probably get good answers from other people on the forums, but I would really appreciate reading your thoughts on this one.

What irritates me is that I...

I don't have SQL2000 at hand, so I can't try, but here's an alternative way to solve it that could be faster or slower. Give it a try.

SELECT Balance...

This should do the trick:

SELECT Balance = ( SELECT TOP 1

...

I got my point because I could guess the spirit of the question from the "UNKNOWN" option, but it's plain wrong.

NULL := NULL

Replace the code in your catch block with something that returns useful information about the error:

BEGIN CATCH

DECLARE @ErrorMessage NVARCHAR(4000)

DECLARE @ErrorSeverity INT

...

It depends. Compare the execution plans with and without date condition, you'll find out for sure.

If unsure, you could also try the performance of the two, changing UPDATE to SELECT.

If...

The two UPDATEs produce the exact same exec plan.

Just a few points:

1) NOLOCK has no effect on the table to update

2) NOLOCK can easily generate inconsistent data, get rid of...

Great tip Paul! Thank you very much!

Really? I use it to build strings to use...

By default, triggers don't fire on a bulk operation. There's a switch to turn on to make triggers fire, but I can't find it on the Wizard. Maybe there's in...

The above query returns data since last service/system restart, but it can't be limited to a specific date range.

Maybe there's some other DMV to...

You can look at the index usage stats in sys.dm_db_index_usage_stats, but you can only detect index updates, you can't determine if the write operation comes from an INSERT, UPDATE or...

And why keep people giving crap advice on backups?

I'm so glad SQL2008 doesn't support that "feature" any...

Thanks for clarifying Wayne. So, it works the same as permanent tables: I was fearing that a different behaviour could apply.

I wrote that because I use indexes on temp tables...