Thanks for your help I used a view instead of temp table because the reporting tool we are using cannot use temp tables.

This works like magic But I am confused I thought temp tables are suppose to be slower than inner joins

I really appreciate your help on this

the derived table AL2and3 has 45 rows the query takes exactly the same time as before and the execution plan is also the same....

Thanks for ypur help

I have clustered index on vch_course_id on AL2 and indexes on other fields not being used in the query. on the Al1 I have a clustered index...