>Fabio,
>
>It's documented UNION behavior not a bug. From the help, "When two columns of different data types are involved in a UNION operation, the data type with the lower precedence is converted to the data type with the higher precedence".

Too bad CAST() can not be designed to supercede precedence since its design is to CONVERT data types AND the UNION definition came about BEFORE the CAST function. Seems like a bad case of divergence of logic to me.