My question is why couldn't you rewrite the example in the article as the following:

IF @Last <> '' AND @First = ''

BEGIN

SELECT * FROM authors WHERE au_lname LIKE...

I suppose I should have clarified... I want to do this without using dynamic SQL.

Thanks for the quick response, you guys answered my questions to a tee. We should not be going through the NAS at all for the data access, just directly...