For practically every piece of code you develop, there will be trade-offs. Sometimes, you can combine the best of two worlds, other times it comes down to some hard choices. For T-SQL developers, it typically boils down to a few key questions:

• How much time can you spend perfecting code instead of just shipping?
• Can we just fix it when it becomes a problem?
• Is buying more hardware cheaper than paying for developers to tune their code?
• Is better code harder to read, and will a junior developer be able to work with it?

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