Anything to do with LIKE forcing a table scan? Don't get me wrong. I like this solution as a way around certain problems. I'm looking at adding TEXT and NTEXT column types to your script. I have one of those projects where we store e-mails in a database. I want to do searches where certain words or phrases occur in either the subject, body, or response. They are looking at adding a comment column and your proc would just automatically start looking at that too.