Thanks for the replies guys.

I tried 2 of your suggestions and both work.

Ray M and Noeld are the winners.

It still doesn't explain why it behaves like this though.....

The optimizer is...

Hi Julian,

The proc was well defined, just a cut and paste error here.

I tried the SET TEXTSIZE but SQL Server gives the following error :

"The assignment operator operation cannot take...

I will post them noeld as soon as I get some time next week. I will be on training all week.

The query of noeld is ok on small tables but I ran it (with 2 numbers in the list) on a 75 million rows table and it took 8 minutes...

This site is simply the Best !!

2 times I posted and 2 times I got incredile solutions in less than an hour !!

Thanks to all of you.

Wow! Thanks. I'm always impressed when people take all that time to help others.

Have a wonderful day mia !

The thing is that I can't use exec (@sql) because I use the select statement in the FOR clause of a CURSOR declaration. I didn't find a way to...