Now. THAT's what I'm talking about!  Thanks, Colin!

Good information... thanks, Bob.  Tracey may not be acknowledging my requests but I hope (s)he is getting something out of this...

Heh... good catch... I "pasted" the wrong key

Heh... yeah... and I'm still wondering why anyone would even use the term "bashing" in relation to what I posted.  And I certainly wasn't trying to "eat at" anyone.

So, James,...

Heh... sorry about that... saw the recent post and didn't check the dates on the history.

You feel "bashed" by anything on this thread?   Most folks express some urgency when they post a question and your's is likely interesting... All...

He's gotta load all the data into a staging table, anyway... why not use it?  End result will be the same except the switch will be much, much faster...

You bet... thanks, for the feedback.

I'm not sure you're telling the whole story... if the 800 million rows is a staging table, of sorts, why not just add a "present" column to it and update...

Johnathan's code is good... but check the performance and resource usage when compared to the numbers-table solution that Remi squeezed off...

Hey Remi... nice loop on the table creation

Just curious... why didn't you just try it?

Well, what say thee, James... I see at least 3 people that really wanna help you fix this... all you need to do is post the offending code. 

Uh, Terry... if you think that's bad, wait until the world of hurt you run across when you try to do something a bit sophisticated in ISQL... ISQL is severly...

Why?  The path should take care of things just fine.

Why so hell-bent on using table variables?  They live in the exact same place that Temp Tables do and have the disadvantage of not using statistics.  Use the Temp Table...