Okay, I am a little dissapointed. I had read how efficient and fast recursive CTE's are compared to CURSOR's, however when I run the CTE against my data set of 1000+ records it takes far too long. When I run the CURSOR it only takes 4 seconds. The shape table has the ShapeID as the primary key and the shape field does have a spatial index. Any thoughts on why the recursive CTE is taking so long?