funnily enough I've been thinking along the same lines, but the joins are so complex, with the tables at the bottom of the script joining four or five others further up, it may be tricky.

What I've thought this afternoon is the insert bit of the script. Trying to insert 6m rows onto a table that has had indexes (indicies?) rebuilt that step before is ridiculous; one of which had a fillfactor of 0/100. The longer serving members of staff insist they're needed, as the main table reference for the select part of the insert is the table that gets inserted into!

I'll do some checking next week, with index hints, to see whether the degradation of performance experienced by removing the index is gained back by inserting into a heap with none.