Didn't we gave some faster alternatives in the forums for this function?

I'm not sure what's the problem as I get those results immediately in my laptop. A different option that we use here is using OPENXML which requires sp_xml_preparedocument and sp_xml_removedocument.

You could try to change the DISTINCT with GROUP BY. That might force it to eliminate duplicates before creating the XMLs (although, it doesn't seem like you need the DISTINCT...

As variable as the critics for the new Star War...

I would take some benefit of using the integers behind and performance improvement of using an inline table-valued function.

CREATE FUNCTION dbo.ifn_DifferenceBetweenDates
(
  @Date1 Datetime, --...

I thank you for the test, Jeff. However, I still don't believe that someone will be updating 10 million rows at a time. The most common scenario would be to...

I guess Joe is not in the table because he's not elite? :hehe:
Go Ravens!