And reading your original email all the way to the end - depending on the exec plan the FETCH part may be the easy part - EXEC for example needs to pin the cursor, put binds in place in memory, walks through the execution plan "initializes" various row sources that may mean memory allocation (but for SELECTs, the actual plan execution and row production starts in FETCH)... So, can't assume that EXEC is less memory intensive than a 4 logical IO-doing fetch that follows it. Tanel