Sorry should have mentioned , been there done that. It does kind of make a difference but only for a day at most and there isn't enough activity on the table to make day old statistics invalid. I find it odd that it takes a BETWEEN range condition over an equality one. It does seem to get much worse when we have some light days and the number of rows at the top end of the query date range are low, like it guesses that all days in the range have this small number of rows. I really don't want to have to go down the road of updating statistics every day on a table where the row distribution doesn't change that much :crazy: