Thank you very much for the link to Sommarskog blog! This is a very informative article.

Tess

Thank you very much for the helpful response.

All of the database objects are within the same database, and all are under dbo. except for the audit tables, which are under...

Success!

I got the number of tics right, the conversions right, added another column to make the ordering more unique, and ... voila! It works 😀

Thank you everyone for pointing...

Thank you. The dynamic SQL version that doesn't use Row_Number()works fine. However, I'm having a problem getting the Row_Number() to work dynamically.

Here's where things break down...

Where I'd like to order...

You are correct: the CTE does not return the results consistently. The same data row results with a different Row_Number() just by re-running the query. And the order by is...

The largest table is ~8 million rows; other tables are about 3 and 5 million.

For performance, would you recommend using the temp table approach?

Cheers

Thank you for the suggestion; I'll run the CTE alone and see what the row number is.