The example I gave was not the best in that it immediate brought up questions of why I was trying to generate the key in that way in the first place.

The situation is more one of coming into a place where they keys are generated in this way, but for each table and I wanted to make it generic.

The question is more: how do I get out results when EXEC a string and its SQL 6.5 compatibility, otherwise I would have used sp_executesql.

I found a great solution at this website:

http://www.sqlteam.com/item.asp?ItemID=4619

where the author recommends creating a temporary table and putting the results inside as an INSERT.