I got turned off by the apparent lack of understanding of how to use "IF EXISTS". Do you really think you need to do concatenation there??? You don't need to specify any columns in your SELECT when all you're doing is checking for EXISTS. "IF EXISTS(SELECT 1 FROM ... WHERE ...) will get you the same result, although with slightly better performance. When I start reading an "article" that shows this kind of lack of basic understanding I don't waste my time getting to the end of it. Who knows what kind of crap I could get stuck in my head if I wasn't careful.