Why are you turning NOCOUNT off, when there are statements in there (eg the INSERT INTO) which will generate rowcount messages ?

SELECT DISTINCT

  CASE

    WHEN Member_1 < Member_2

    THEN Member_1

    ELSE Member_2

  END As Member_1,

  CASE

    WHEN Member_1 > Member_2

    THEN Member_1

    ELSE Member_2

  END As Member_2

FROM YourTable

Which 1 of these 2 statements from the initial post & subsequent replies above is actually correct ?

>>The 'recordid' column is an IDENTITY column in both tables.

>>Table D:  recordid is VARCHAR(50)

Please post the DDL of the tables. It may also help to post the results of using SET SHOWPLAN_TEXT ON, with the 2 alternative queries.

This thread is 14 months old ... chances are they have the answer by now

If there's no index on EVENT_DATE, you're unlikely to do much better.

If there was an index, this might perform better, depending on the type of index and selectivity etc:

SELECT *

FROM...

Your query to get data uses a left join but:

>>AND tbl_assignment.resultcode = 'DNS'

You reference the left-joined table in the where clause thereby implicitly converting it to an inner join.

I'm not...

The set-based solution will scale better to a larger table. It will also translate easily to the new ROW_NUMBER ranking function coming in Sql Server 2005 that will get rid...

Why are you using a cursor ?

Select Identity(int, 1, 1) As NewValue,

  WorkSitePKEY

Into #Sequence

From WorkSite

Where Cred_ID IS NULL

Update WorkSite

Set Cred_ID = Cast( s.NewValue As varchar(10) )

From WorkSite As w

Inner Join...

Are there any triggers defined on table 'Appointment' and are you aware of how that impacts @@IDENTITY and SCOPE_IDENTITY() ifthis is the case ?

Have you tried using SELECT instead of...

However ... you can't specify a FillFactor on a heap.

Since you only Update throughout the year, and since those updates are on int columns that don't cause page splitting, you...

More differences:

Truncate cannot be used if there are foreign keys referencing the table.

Truncate resets any Identity columns to their Seed value, Delete does not.

The design isn't "wrong", as long as some assumptions hold true. eg: Can a player be on more than 1 team ? Assumption is No.

Given that:

Select dt.TeamNum, p1.Name As Player1Name,...

>> And it shouldn't take minutes to retrieve the first row. 

That depends on many factors.

An ORDER BY potentially causes the optimizer to select a different query execution plan. Depending on...

>>Within the sproc, it hangs at the first fetch after the OPEN CURSOR stmt.

How do you *know* it hangs ? What are you using to diagnose this ? Maybe it's...