Thanks for the confirmation on this Gail. Is there any good reason you can think of to always be using the WITH(NOLOCK) hint in all queries? This is not a financial institute I am working with, but they do have some financial record keeping in the various databases, along with time critical items from auction bidding. Wouldn't the WITH(NOLOCK) defeat the whole purpose of discouraging against dirty reads? Or is it such a performance increase that it's worth it to be used indiscriminately? I've read that DEVS will use it to get around back database design on long running queries, but it just seems to me to be a lot like addressing symptoms instead of addressing the real issue of database design.