Finally, An Answer (and a mea culpa) For Adam Machanic
I've once again been frightfully neglectful of this blog, as the holidaze, shifting work assignments, and the occasional personal event have combined to render me a poor custodian.
The good news is that I've got a backlog of tidbits to share. Before we get started with those, though, I'd like to respond to Adam Machanic's comment on my last NULLity post. Adam is correct, and a central point in my post was incorrect (one of the risks of 27 years in a business is that one occasionally gets one's platform-oriented wires crossed).
In SQL Server, if you build an index on a column, and that column is NULL in a particular record, there WILL be a pointer to that row in the index. There are DBMSes on the market where this is not the case, which is where I got confused.
I've updated the original post to reflect this information.
Thanks, Adam, for pointing this out.
More soon..