Grant Fritchey covers a concept I’d never heard of:
Correlated Datetime Columns works. Clearly it’s not something you’re going to enable on all your databases. Probably most of your databases don’t have clustered indexes on datetime columns let alone enough tables with correlation between the data stored in them. However, when you do have that type of data correlation, enabling Correlated Datetime Columns and ensuring you have a clustered index on the datetime column is a viable tuning mechanism. Further, this is a mechanism that has been around since 2005. Just so you know, I did all my testing in SQL Server 2016, so this something that anyone in the right situation can take advantage of. Just remember that TANSTAAFL always applies. Maintaining the statistics needed for the Correlated Datetime Columns is done through materialized views that are automatically created through the optimization process. You can see the views in SSMS and any queries against the objects. You’ll need to take this into account during your statistics maintenance. However, if Correlated Datetime Columns is something you need, this is really going to help with this, fairly narrow, aspect of query tuning.
I don’t know that I’ll ever do this, but it’s worth filing away just in case.