Hi there, I tried filtered indexes as you suggest and that was beneficial in it's own right. But I knew I could go further. Some of the table have very high selectivity (eg typically 7500 Active records out of 20 million rows) and some less so and I just knew that a 'full covering filtered index' including all columns would not be a great overhead and enable the query optimiser to get the right answer every time without thinking about it and that proved to be the case. It could be a very dangerous technique where selectivity is not so good and there is much higher data volume changing the status field. Sometimes you just know. The hardest thing was figuring out that a filtered index could create a virtual table by including all the other fields, even though it now seem obvious, as almost every example of such indexes only include a few fields but my index looks very strange with many fields!