Jim,

>So then the conclusion is; since the optimization may not work under certain conditions we should prevent it from working under all conditions?

Certain conditions ? I think this could be replaced by many conditions. I really do think that only in a few cases rushmore would benefit from a tag on DELETED(). I've never seen a case where a tag on deleted() lead to a significant improvement of performance other than where tables contain more than acceptable amounts of deleted records.

>That doesn't make sense to me. Having an index on deleted will optimize many queries

Will it ????

>and there are some that it can't do because of table size, however I am not willing to give up the optimization on those that it does work for.

I'm just telling that in many cases the deleted() tag will NOT work and it COULD be just a burden.