Bruce,

>That is, no matter how many deleted recs are in a table, is there ever a benefit in the deleted index if you:

>1) Always use NOFILTER
>2) Never use SET DELETED OFF

I think (and again this is only theory) the optimizer will use the DELETED tag when whenever SET DELETED = ON. To check for any gains of speed use we can use the example of David and delete (randomly) about 50% of the records and run the tests again.

I'll predict that the the time to complete this test with a tag on DELETED() would be between 60 - 70% of the time to run it without a tag on deleted.


Regards,

Walter