SQL Cursors are very useful and powerful because they offer a high degree of row-level data manipulation, but this power comes at a price: negative performance. In simple cases there...

You need try it. I don't know if timestamp is exclusion. I did not  test it with timestamp column.

Please try to read article carefully before trying.

#1. You can use "nolock" hint

#2. I did exclude where clause from the tests I was doing. Insert all rows to the temporary...

Thanks, that you get attention to my wording (not many people captured it)

There are several tricks. When you define the suspicious objects that may not be used, you can...

Yes if you get cache in a short period time after they run. I was running tests every 2-3-5 minutes for 2 month. As I said you will have just...

You forgot actually run the function or proc first before test it in cache memory

select name, id from sysobjects where name = 'get_emp_list_FY06'

exec get_emp_list_FY06

Then:

select bucketid, cacheobjtype,...

Check my article http://www.sqlservercentral.com/columnists/lPeysakhovich/howtofindthatjobisrunning.asp

It gives you some additions to the issue.

Your last point is valid.

"why would you create a column with sequencial number just so you can have a clustered index as suggested by others. I can't see the benefit...

Varchar is always slower, but char data type for free form columns will creates much more problems. So, stay with varchar. 

In most cases when you searching a name application iis searching with like criteria. And if it is '%company%' index will not be used.

Yep, can be done this way. Good proposal

1. To address issues for deletion you may store not an after row but the current row and the type of transaction. It will allow handle the deletion and will...

I have used such triggers for a while. Performance degradation is about 20%.

For non-heavy OLTP systems this is a simple solution that is working. We got 200+ databases every year...

If a text field is a part of the table, then separate statement should be added as a part of the trigger for the table. But it will bring the...

What kind of reporting?

First, you can write not a old row of data to the audit table, but new row of data. This will allow you to keep everything in...