Basically correct. Although, it really only matters to the internals engine. For your purposes, both are dealt with the same way. According the to the Internals book, a hash table goes to what is called a work file, but that's treated in all ways the same as a work table. Further, when you have a hash join and you look at the I/O stats of the query, that hash is evidenced as something called a work table. So, I just treat the hash as a type of work table since the external evidence is exactly the same and MS labels it that way.