We all admire bosses who, to use a British phrase, 'wear their underpants outside their trousers'. (play superman in a crisis). I support this type of solution, but because it is necessary rather than sufficient. As a database developer, I simply hate the thought that that query is still there, grinding away for three hours, albeit only once a day. This is a time-bomb. When the usage of the system quadruples, what then? No! I'm a firm believer in the idea that there are very few queries that can't be improved, and, usually, anything that takes more than ten seconds ought to be improved. In the SQL Speed Phreak challenge on Ask.SQLServerCentral.com we regularly increase performance by two orders of magnitude. The last winner was an SSIS task!