Eliminating the Use of SQL Server Temporary Tables For HUGE Performance Gains: "I recently read the chapter on advanced queries in the book, Professional SQL Server 2000 Programming, and it states that if your result is going to be large, then it might be better to create a temporary table with an index, because derived tables do not have an index. Don’t let the last statement scare you, I’ve seen a few queries go from using temporary tables or cursors to derived tables and the performance was increased by 50% or greater. As always, you will never know until you test!"