At first glance, that might seem like that’s a good thing because generally speaking, you want to use indexes to make your queries go faster. When I CASTed the LastAccessDate as a DATE column, SQL Server did use an index on LastAccessDate. The first two versions of the query are effectively the same, both doing a table scan. I’m using SQL Server 2019, with 2019 compatibility level, and the 50GB StackOverflow2013 database. WHERE CAST ( LastAccessDate AS DATE ) = ''
