Excellent, thanks, I'll look into it! I'm not really familiar with service broker, but it sounds like a potential solution. To answer your question, I really do need multiple async processes. The control procedure is managing data loads for hundreds of tables; it loops repeatedly, checking all sorts of indicators to determine when each table is ready to load, then it executes the SP which loads that table. I'd like each of those table-load SP's to execute asynchronously.

I'm looking for the simplest solution possible. I was hoping there was some switch for EXECUTE or sp_executesql that would launch an SP in a new SPID, or some other simple tweak I can make to get these SP's to process in parallel. All ideas are welcome!