>Thanks - that's a fresh angle!! It's a speed issue that we are dealing with so hopefully that'll be quick enough!
>
>Thanks again
>
>Chris

As John notes and I failed to in my original post, you would probably want to make sure that all preconditions are set so that the insert does not fail or worse does not insert the correct number of rows. You can probably create a dummy table with bogus rows so that you always cover for the TOP n number of rows desired.