The update is done once a day in the morning.  Is that still taxing on the hard drives?

The way it's working now is I update the four costs first then I ran the code in the previous post to get lowestcost and it seems to be working...

What about this??

update bestcost set lowestcost = coalesce(itemfilecost, listcost, bluebookcost, mfrcost)

update bestcost set lowestcost = listcost where listcost < lowestcost

update bestcost set lowestcost = bluebookcost where bluebookcost < lowestcost

update bestcost...

What's involved with a computed column?

The CASE worked like a champ, but sometimes one of the four cost columns is null and it's updating the best cost field to null,...