I took your advice, sort of, on the function and revisited the EXISTS .. after some further reading.  I found how to use a CASE statement to get the code...

I tried both of those, but they made my query run for over a minute.  The EXISTS... gave me an idea.  I performed a join like this and the query...

Can anyone help with XML code that will return results with better speed?  In the example from the post above, a single record with XML that contains 100 CDD and...

I'm a bit of a noob, but couln't he just create computed columns that convert the data to proper types, then create an index on and query on those computed...

The primary key doesn't have to be clustered?

1.  The form for searching sent docs is by date range, so pretty much any time someone uses that form.  Pretty often.
2.  A year is about 40K records or...

Here is requested info in CSV format. That ok?

Sounds like you're getting a dirty read on the database.  Are you using WITH(NOLOCK)?

@drew Allen - Thanks for that info. Still a bit of a noob to SQL query optimization.

@mark-3 Tarquini - I think i would...