Personally I wouldn't go with a home-grown solution for this "packing intervals" problem.
Instead I'd seek out the literature and find that SQL MVP Itzik Ben-Gan has proposed a very fast and elegant solution: Packing Intervals[/url]
For some reason however, that original link is not currently directing to his article (maybe it's gone into archives), but I used his technique (with attribution of course) in this article: Calculating Gaps Between Overlapping Time Intervals in SQL[/url] (see the section on "Packing the Overlapping Login Intervals" sample query #5).
A quick review of that suggests it should server you well in SQL 2005.
My thought question: Have you ever been told that your query runs too fast?
My advice:
INDEXing a poor-performing query is like putting sugar on cat food. Yeah, it probably tastes better but are you sure you want to eat it?
The path of least resistance can be a slippery slope. Take care that fixing your fixes of fixes doesn't snowball and end up costing you more than fixing the root cause would have in the first place.
Need to UNPIVOT? Why not CROSS APPLY VALUES instead?[/url]
Since random numbers are too important to be left to chance, let's generate some![/url]
Learn to understand recursive CTEs by example.[/url]
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