Thank you all very much for your replies, and thank you Jeff for the excellent article that Alan linked to earlier.

I had often read about the merits of set based v's cursors before, but never really grasped the concepts.

More to the point, I didn't realise that half of the code I wrote was set based and half wasn't 🙂

Alan, thank you for the code sample.

I've tried using it, but unfortunately I start hitting limits with the size of the data type.

In my test example that I'm using, I have 10,000 tables that I want to delete.

It appears, that due to the number of tables, I can't populate them all into the parameter, even using varchar(max)

With this many tables, I may be stuck with cursors or similar procedures