Greg D. Moore (Strider) (mooregr_deleteth1s@greenms.com) writes:
> Actually it's an outer join and using HASH or MERGE seems to work fine.

Inner or outer does not make any difference. Books Online:

Join hints, which are specified in a query's FROM clause, enforce a
join strategy between two tables. If a join hint is specified for any
two tables, the query optimizer automatically enforces the join order
for all joined tables in the query, based on the position of the ON
keywords.

--
Erland Sommarskog, SQL Server MVP, esquel@sommarskog.se

Books Online for SQL Server SP3 at
http://www.microsoft.com/sql/techinf...2000/books.asp