Sergey, you are right on as usual. I put SET ANSI ON in my testing, and the optimization worked. Of course, the query was only working before because we had SET ANSI and SET EXACT off, so I don't get any records. *smile* Yeah, the query was kind of braindead, so I simplified anyway. I will look for STR() usage in queries throughout our applications.

As for details, I think sometimes I give waaaaay too many. *smile*

Thanks again!

JoeK