Several people have complained that changing the text column to varchar(max) is bad because you are changing the data, which is right, so I'd just do the conversion in line..select id, convert(varchar(max),somestuff) as 'somestuff' from tableA

union

select id, convert(varchar(max)somestuff) as 'somestuff' from tableB

I'd be wary of changing the UNION to UNION ALL since although, at present, the assumption is that there are no duplicates, I would assume this can't be guaranteed, since otherwise the query would have specified a UNION ALL in the first place!

Of couse, if this is an ad hoc query, rather than production code, than anything that works (and isn't ridiculously poor in performance) is acceptable! 🙂