Ians, I believe you can use it for production.

The last value assigned to @LastKey is the largest NameKey in the set because the update query definitely uses the index [LargeTable__IE1].

I think this could do the job...

set nocount on

SET ROWCOUNT 1000

declare @rowcount int, @batchcount int, @rowsupdated int

declare @LastKey nvarchar(341)

select @rowcount = 1,@batchcount = 0, @rowsupdated = 0, @LastKey =...

Thank you Jeff, I was too sleepy to run comparison tests myself last night.

Your input length condition is a nice touch.

But no Jeff, it not a cross-join nor generates 65,536...

How about this? No dynamic SQL, no (explicit) loop. Just a permanent lookup table.

====================================================================

declare @dec2hex1 table (

id smallint identity(0,1),

hex1 char(1)

)

insert into @dec2hex1 (hex1)

select top 16 null from sysobjects

update @dec2hex1

...