ah cool. Good to know I'm not abusing the udf 🙂

Although I will admit to using them in 1 or 2 insert into select constructs but with no more than a couple of hundred rows being bashed at a time.

I was brought up on QBASIC and ASM with more than a little C++ thrown into the mix (my dad gave me my first programming lesson when I was about 5 years old lol) so for every line of code I write in any language I make it my business to find out what the cpu is actually doing when I give it a command!

now I just need to get my head around OPTION(USE PLAN '...')