Strategies for checking ISNULL on varbinary fields?

Question

In the past I\'ve noted terrible performance when querying a varbinary(max) column. Understandable, but it also seems to happen when checking if it\'s null or not, and I was

Answer 1

We had a similar problem when looking for rows where a varbinary value was not null. For us the solution was to update the statistics for the database:

exec sp_updatestats

After doing this the queries ran much faster.