was working with a quick query to find some data in a netxt field containing a comma-seperated list of countries, so i wrote: select id, countries from tablea where cast(countries as varchar) LIKE '%mozambique%' this didn't return the number of rows i expected so i investigated further. it seems that using cast() in this way (without specifiying a length) creates a varchar of default length. if a string in my ntext fields is longer than this length thestring is terminated. hmm, fun. my curiosity...