Hugo Kornelis (9/7/2013)The actual answer is "@X is now A<". That's because the author uses ISNULL instead of the recommended COALESCE. ISNULL does not follow the normal data type precedence rules, but always returns the data type of the first argument. In this case, @X is the first argument, and @X is char(1) - so the result of ISNULL is 'A' ('A NULL' converted / truncated to char(1).)