Here is an idea: - Create a new table PickOrder with 2 columns - division and chosenName. - Iniitialize PickOrder with 4 records -    ('North', 'a1')    ('South', 'a1')    ('East', 'a1')    ('West, 'a1') Now, in sp_GetAssignedDetails, 1- Get the chosenName value (cn) from the PickOrder table for the requested division. 2- Using your query, select the top 1 record WHERE actorName > cn ... ORDER BY actorName 3- if no record is found in step 2 and there are existing records for that division (i.e., we have exhuasted the list), set the chosenName to 'a1' and repeat step 2 to start with the first name. 4- Update the chosenName column value in PickOrder table with the actorName found in step 2, so that next time we can pick the next name. -- modified (added ORDER BY clause) at 22:08 Thursday 2nd November, 2006 -- Damodar Periwal Software Tree, Inc. Simplify Data Integration

Cheers Scott, That was very informative. Yeah, unfortunately I'm not a DB developer. Just trying to think this stuff out for myself as we have no DB expertise in work. From the above code I'm trying to sequentially chose the above @actorName so that the workload is spread evenly amongst employees from the different divisions. At the moment it is picking the first one off the database table. Are there any handy stored proc functions that allows a sequential generator of names so that each @actorName in the database will get picked from their appropraite divisons?? Any help would be apprecaited. Kind Regards, BC

You should use ranNum.Next(length) instead of ranNum.Next(0, length) as it produces random numbers within the same range and is almost 2 times faster. Also I would suggest to retrieve the array length dynamically instead of using a fix value. Either do it when you call the GetRandomInt method or even remove the length parameter and do it inside the method. int randumNum = GetRandomInt(intArray, intArray.Length); "Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning." - Rick Cook www.troschuetz.de