As I mentioned, I ran (all of) your SQL without seeing a problem. I trust the above "33" is a typo relative to your original "3". How big is the database? Your query is bound to take some time on large datasets. (I'm pretty sure it did not take "for ever", otherwise we would not have seen your original post yet. ;-) A link to it on a file-sharing site would be welcome. I did look at the query plan for the 3 statements you provided. The query looked like it should terminate, but it is doing a join which appears to be O(N * log N). If I get the data, I will see if it forms some data-dependent loop, but I do not see how that could happen, yet.