Jeff

I guess we have all had our wins of note. I think my best was 4h+ to under 13minutes.

I also don't deny the importance of squeezing all available performance with transactional systems and high frequency stored procedures. However my original question did (try to) restrict answers to data warehousing style applications.

Fortunately that role came to and end, and I'm now working somewhere that has a more balanced view on how to do things. The old place (finally) admitted that their approach was wrong and are now trying a different tack. Datatypes were not the only bad design decision they made - there were a number.

pcd