Thanks Mark! That didn't quite get all the way there because it still returned 12 rows but it DID give me the push I needed to crack it. 😀

select...

Where is this sytax documented at? Specifically the last bit after the cross apply, i.e. 'as x(y)'. And the references in the query to it, i.e. 'x.y.query('...'

What is...

I learned the "SELECT 1" thing way WAY back in SQL 6.5, maybe even SyBase SQL.

Sorry for the tone of my post initially. We're in a pre-deployment test cycle...

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...