Just so it's clear, I thought I'd post the code that would populate the two tables. Works a charm, thanks very much!

DECLARE @xml xml

SET @xml =

'<ReportDetails>

<ReportRequest>

<ReportRequestCaseNo>1</ReportRequestCaseNo>

<PersonDetails>

<PersonDetailsCaseNo>1</PersonDetailsCaseNo>

<FirstName>Bob</FirstName>

<SurName>Smith</SurName>

<Address>1B Shady St, London</Address>

<OtherNames>

<OtherName>Robert...

Superb! Having a little play on my small sample and does the trick perfectly!

Going to try and apply it to the full document, will let you know how I...

Hi Wayne,

Thanks for the response. Bit of a bummer then. 🙁 I'm trying to play around with ways in which to try and break each fragment down seperately...

I managed to sort the issue as described here:-

http://blogs.msdn.com/chrissk/archive/2009/07/27/how-replication-setting-immediate-sync-may-cause-transactional-replication-distribution-database-growth.aspx

Changing the immediate sync setting to FALSE appears to have resolved the problem, and the distribution database is now being cleaned up...

I've amended the distrubution settings to have a max retention time of 1 hour and the process now seems to be clearing down the replicated transactions; however obviously this isn't...