No arguments there. Hence the subject (How to improve performance of...

I made a small typo in the original post. The very first line of the SQL statement should start with:

select min(id)... instead of

select min(row_id)

Anyway, here is the query...

I am trying this out on a development machine with no other users besides me and no inserts or updates going to the single table database. I figured NORECOMPUTE...

I had already tried UPDATE STATISTICS with no benefit. I tried the following again:

UPDATE STATISTICS Table1

WITH FULLSCAN, NORECOMPUTE

And verified that it has no impact on performance...