Thanks much Dwain! I will try it out when I get the free moment and see where it goes!

Beh... feel dirty... resorted to loop instead of set based. If anyone has a set based with window functions in 2005 that is cleaner, I'd love to see it.

What I...

One of the reasons I side-tracked to actual plan gratitude was that I was bugging Jason Strate about how he was collecting the parameters just before that, and having trouble...

Thought this WAS attached, but I hit back by accident. Ah well:

You're awesome for the help, Gail. Thank you as always, very much. Just putting up some results in case you get as curious as I.

Index took just over 3 minutes...

Also will dump a screen capture here just in case it is of help - off topic relates to PerfectDisk. I ran a lot of testing on PerfectDisk but we...

Remember to check both user databases and system databases. TempDB re-initializes after server restart and goes back to the initial size setting. When you do a restart on the service,...

Is any of the defrag you are doing going to a volume that contains the TempDB database and if so, what is the initial size of the TempDB database set...

Was referring to setting the "initial size" on the database to a larger number than it currently is from database properties in SSMS. Since the database had roughly 50% free...

Did you grow your database file before the physical defragmentation to prevent future fragmentation on the volume for the database files? What was the down time? Was another defragment tool...

Ahh, I see. OrigTransID is original Trans ID which could be 0 if the current one is the original and there is no back dated lookup needed.

Sorry, "IDs" are linked...

Tried the table variable versus temp table, table variable had given about a 2 minute time cut over temp table. The results that come back are usually only 1 to...

Thanks both for the actual plan info versus cached. I had thought the cached plan would update last run param values or first run after the cache was cleaned, not...

Oops, plan attached.

Oddly (to me) that was the plan from cache, from production, after running:

SELECT query_plan

FROM sys.dm_exec_cached_plans moo ...