Hey Sandy,

Don't limit your options, Gail is better at this stuff than I am.

You need to think about these as different things with different functions. CTE is an extremely neat and clean way to create a multi-use derived table, a temporary view as others defined it. Table variables and temporary tables are methods for persisting data temporarily. Neither directly assists in querying the way a CTE does. Usually they're used when you need to some sort of multi-step manipulation or share data between processes or something along those lines. But again, when the time comes to query the data out of a table variable or temp table, there are very distinct differences in behavior that, depending on the amount of data, makes temp tables perform better than table variables.

Cheers.