Nice one Jeff - I can see it's been a little while in the making (given all of the handy graphics...)
You might care to edit your first post in this thread (where the link to the article is supposed to appear). Looks like the link got "et" (southern for "eaten").
Link is Hidden RBAR: Triangular Joins[/url]
Not paying attention to the cardinality of a query is definitely an issue. Even the best of set processors will eventually choke on sets with polynomial growth factors.
And - welcome to the SQL2005 family (at last). I'm curious to see if your view of it changes at all.....
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Your lack of planning does not constitute an emergency on my part...unless you're my manager...or a director and above...or a really loud-spoken end-user..All right - what was my emergency again?