Hi Jeff...

I appreciate you doing the time tests. Obviously I have to eat my words talking about "half the CPU". When I did comparisons between what I posted and the original code, that is, in fact, what I saw (in Profiler)... but it was very informal and was not as scientific as what you posted.

As I said, I hadn't read through the last 3 years of posts (I came into this because SQLServerCentral had your SQLSpackle post at the top of their email blast of Friday... it wasn't until I clicked on the link that I found the article was 3 years old). But it's interesting to see the myriad of alternate solutions that have come in. Now that you posted your recent time tests, I'm going to have a look at them all.

Best...

--Brad