'So, my question would be, how many rows are in the table you need to do this on?  Also, why do you need to do this?  An INT column will...

For the paging issue: this was done in an effort to reduce network traffic. I intially developed the stored proc to return all applicable rows and used a client...

Thanks for the info. I have another wrinkle to add. I would like to use the output or the union queries in another statement. Specifically, I need...