Eve, as far as I'm concerned, your method here is the holy grail to me. I have been looking for a way to update or insert from one table to another, and have tried to write something myself that doesn't use a cursor and doesn't take forever to execute for weeks now. I finally entered the correct search phrase into Google search today and discovered your post. Within a few minutes I modified it to work on my main table of 7 million + records being updated or inserted into from my new table of 200,000 + records. What took over 40 minutes to do with a cursor method now takes 1 minute, 37 seconds to execute. I am elated and want to thank you very much for making my day.