I came across this post a little too late. In fact the symptoms my servers are showing are exactly as described on the original post but I'm running on Windows...

This was an absolutely wicked T-SQL, but also a great challenge to understand how things are parsed. I was having a hard time understanding that the expression in the derived...

I find strange that when I tested this on my SQL Server 2008 box I always got Index Seeks (never a scan, even when the tables was defined with a...

We learn something new every day... questions like these humble the most arrogant DBAs...

Having said that, I read in this discussion that the operations are indeed permitted in T-SQL because...

Thanks for taking the time to reply Tom...

There is something that I don't understand about this one.

The article that is referenced in the solution says:

"When sql_variant values of the char, varchar, nchar, or nvarchar data types are...