Thank you for the pointer about locking the table. I dont need to do it here though. The job that does the select is also the only thing that writes to the table. And I realy need to get some reports done on this thing to keep people happy. I will try to clean it up later.
the sql 99 merge thing looks useful but I do not know if it would have helped me with this project because I wanted to update only 1 field or insert all of them. Well if I continue doing more DB work I will continue to learn more stuff and hopefuly have better questions( and on topic ones) in the future.
thanks again
