UPDATE: Since I hadn't tried it on the local disk I decided to try this on my laptop

For the test I had scheduled a batch file to run...

Thanks for the response, but there is no activity on this machine aside from this process. The scheduled task was scheduled to run every 30 minutes for a period...

yeah that is correct. i kinda short handed it for ease of me posting. but really it looks more like this.

since equals(=) won't work on nulls...

isnull( column1, '') ...

Ok! I guess that the union would gradually degrade depending on how many parameters i'd have to string together?

I guess this one of those cases where dynamic sql is...

Thanks! I had considedered posting this in a blog but don't know where I could post it. Do you have any suggestions of where I could place this...