SQL Server NOLOCK and joins

Question

Background: I have a performance-critical query I\'d like to run and I don\'t care about dirty reads.

My question is; If I\'m using joins, do I have to specify the NOLOC

Answer 1

Neither. You set the isolation level to READ UNCOMMITTED which is always better than giving individual lock hints. Or, better still, if you care about details like consistency, use snapshot isolation.