OK, You lead me to a solution.

declare @val nvarchar(4000)

exec master.dbo.xp_instance_regread

N'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE',

N'Software\Microsoft\MSSQLServer\SQLServerAgent',

N'DatabaseMailProfile',

OK, Thanks, got it now.

'Input' is not necessarily the same as 'table in the from clause'

Regards

Simon

Thanks Guys,

Interesting but not really what I'm after.

To put it another way.

My Problem - I found one of my servers had the Agent Mail Profile unchecked, and it wasn't sending...

Hi Jason,

a quick question, because I'm just not getting it straight in my head.

You said "For any joins, use the first (top) input to build the hash table and the...

From my course notes from SQLSkills IE1, module 10 Indexing strategies (Taught by Kimberly Tripp from sqlskills.com), Slide 37, Join Strategies :

"Hash join

Two-phsae operation (build, then probe): Build table(smaller...