@heb1014 (Great Reference btw!)

I haven't used the SET STATISTICS much, so I hope I did it correctly. Running it with TIME made sense, but I don't understand...

@heb1014:

When I ran your test against a table with 18,399 rows I got these results:

if exists (select count(*) from A )

...

I agree with what you wrote regarding the use of EXISTS being more efficient than using COUNT.

To take it one notch higher, I always use

EXISTS (select TOP 1 PrimaryKeyField...