Gail, reading between the lines, I think what the senior DBA is saying is that if you insert data that is already sorted in the order of the clustered index of the destination table, then SQL Server has less work to do when the data is inserted. However, the ORDER BY and the clustered index insert both use a sort operation, as your test shows, so I don't think it makes much difference. Bhuvnesh, you need to test and test this before deciding how to proceed - you'll be especially interested in what happens when there's already a lot of data in the destination table.

John