Brent Ozar shows why the StartDate + EndDate pattern is not great for filtering:
If all you need to do is look up the memberships for a specific UserId, and you know the UserId, then it’s a piece of cake. You put a nonclustered index on UserId, and call it a day.
But what if you frequently need to pull all of the memberships that were active on a specific date? That’s where performance tuning gets hard: when you don’t know the UserId, and even worse, you can’t predict the date/time you’re looking up, or if it’s always Right Now.
This is where I advocate pivoting to a series of event records, so instead of a start date and end date, you have an event type (started, expired, cancelled, etc.) and a date. There are other alternatives as well, but it’s a good thought exercise.