Thanks Steve and Luis for the enlightenment.

I was a bit hesitant to ask this question, but your answers have really helped a lot. There's a good atmosphere at...

Thanks Luis

That seems to work perfectly, and after getting my head around CROSS APPLY and the partition_stats DMV somewhat, I am beginning to understand why. Just checking though:...

Famous last words: "I just found the last bug!" Yeah, right. Hope springs eternal though.

Every piece of software, bar the most trivial, has bugs. And every piece of...

My train of thought on seeing this went domething like this... SQLPREF? Something odd there. Isn't it meant to be SQLPERF? Never actually used it, being more a developer than...

This is my sort of article. Starts off with a high level overview, says what it isn't as well as what it is, and gives some reasons why you might...

I have been looking at The BOL page for UPDATE again, and just noticed this remark well down the page, in a sub-sub-definition:

table_or view_name
Is the...

To sum up then, what people seem to be saying is that...

In order for the UPDATE to make sense, the table expression in the FROM must necessarily

BTW, I meant to post this in the SQL Server 2012 T-SQL forum - my apologies.

MarkD