>>Ok, let me know how these 2 will fare, I am curious.
>
>It actually went pretty good. This extra verification in the command accounts for about 4 million additional SQL Server processes and it only takes 10 additional minutes. The process went from 3 hours and 15 minutes to 3 hours and 25 minutes.

Not sure we're talking about the same. I was wondering about the code I wrote with 2 ctes.