Understood.

You guys go ahead and call it whatever you want...that's the beauty of programming. I named it after the 2nd definition of "Tally" found here...

http://education.yahoo.com/reference/dictionary/entry/tally

... which says...

2.a. A stick on which notches are made to keep a count or score.

... stretching the definition a bit, it IS my computational "Tally" stick for reckoning what a loop would normally do. :hehe:

Hey Joe... lot's of folks have made a "sequence" CTE such as what you say... would you mind posting yours? I've got one for Oracle (they call CTE's "Sub_Query Refactoring: in Oracle) at work that you might be interested in, as well. I'll post it tomorrow.

In the meantime, if you have SQL Server 2005 and you want something that acts like a "Tally/Numbers/Sequence/Integers/IndexCount" table, here's a method that blows the doors off the recursive methods a lot of folks have come up with especially if it's called more than once... yes, I agree... it's non-portable code and I don't care... the Oracle method that I'll post tomorrow isn't either... I'm knowingly sacrificing portability for performance (like I usually do :P)...

[font="Courier New"];WITH

cteTally AS

(--==== Create a Tally CTE from 1 to a desired count

 SELECT TOP (@DesiredCount)

        ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY t1.Object_ID) AS N

   FROM Master.sys.All_Columns t1

  CROSS JOIN Master.sys.All_Columns t2

)

 SELECT *

   FROM cteTally

[/font]