Sometimes, Michael J. Swart says, it’s better to just do it:
Okay, this is getting out of hand. The query shouldn’t have to be this complicated.
Luckily I work with a guy named Chris. He’s amazing at what he does. He questions everything without being a nitpicker (there’s a difference). He read through the Mythbusters post and followed all the links in the comments. He asked whether gbn’s JFDI pattern wasn’t better here. So I implemented it just to see what that looked like:
I’ve ended up doing the same thing in a similar scenario. But as Aaron Bertrand notes in the comments, test your results because performance could end up being even worse than before.