Just a faulty manner of thinking about the index on my part. Thank you for helping me clear that up!

Simple, why are you concatenating the two columns when the...

Thanks Gail, too. You may be right and I think I've run into that before. I am such a hack that I wasn't sure how to update stastics...

Thanks Lynn! In my first test, that is running great! Your suggestion seems to perform about the same for processing time but didn't experience the hiccups...

I had tried...

for the new tables:

CREATE TABLE t15_all (file_year varchar(4), rownum INT IDENTITY(1,1), somedata varchar(55))

CREATE CLUSTERED INDEX idx_clstr ON t15_all (file_year, rownum)

CREATE TABLE t15a_all (file_year varchar(4), rownum INT IDENTITY(1,1), theIndex INT, someotherdata...