>Just curious (and this is almost in the "splitting hairs" department), have you ever looked at the execution plan when doing the (select top 1 order by date desc), versus the (select max(Orderdate) approach?

Yes, I guess I did. In the second article I posted execution plans and my results for simulation tests. From the common sense the ORDER BY may take longer than MAX, but in my tests ORDER BY was winning (for that particular test I was doing).

Also, in the comments to the first blog I list two long MSDN threads there I think we did performance testing as well.

I haven't re-visited the issue recently, but packed value solution usually wins performance wise.

Say, re-visited this thread now http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/transactsql/thread/824546a0-0c03-4af6-86c6-8df9f5381f2b and there ORDER BY solution was the slowest.