Hello everyone,

First of all, my name is Hugo.
I'm having a very strange situation when performing an Incremental Population.

I have a Table "A" with a timestamp column, and a catalogue over three
columns of "A". This table has only 100K rows (a subset of our production
environment, with about 3 Million rows).
Just after performing a Full Population, I've started an Incremental
Population, and the time was exactly the same on both operations! I didn't
change any row (no updates, no inserts, no deletes, nothing was done), so the
timestamp didn't change as well.

1. Was it expected? I was expecting to see the Incr. Popul. taking less time
to finish than a Full one! What do you think I forgot?

2. I'd also appreciate your guidance on the following question:
This table has customers information and (once in production, with 3 Million
rows) it's supposed to be updated every 48h on about 5K rows (50% updates,
30% inserts, and 20% unfortunately deletes!!!).
What do you think it'd be the best approach?
Should I run an Incremental Population after that table update (every 48h),
or switch the Change Tracking on with scheduled Re-Indexing? After the above
strange behaviour, I'm affraid that an Incremental Popul. would take as long
as a Full Popul.

Ah! I'm using SQL Server 2000 on a 2.8 GHz 4 processor box with 1GB of RAM.

Thanks for your precious help in advance.

BR,
Hugo