Microsoft SQL Server 2008 (SP1), getting an unexpected 'Conversion failed' error. Not quite sure how to describe this problem, so below is a simple example. The CTE extracts the numeric portion of certain IDs using a search condition to ensure a numeric portion actually exists. The CTE is then used to find the lowest unused sequence number (kind of): CREATE TABLE IDs (ID CHAR(3) NOT NULL UNIQUE); INSERT INTO IDs (ID) VALUES ('A01'), ('A02'), ('A04'), ('ERR'); WITH ValidIDs (ID, seq) AS ( SELECT ID, CAST(RIGHT(ID, 2) AS INTEGER) FROM IDs WHERE ID LIKE 'A[0-9][0-9]' ) SELECT MIN(V1.seq) + 1 AS next_seq FROM ValidIDs AS V1 WHERE NOT EXISTS ( SELECT * FROM ValidIDs AS V2 WHERE V2.seq = V1.seq + 1 ); The error is, 'Conversion failed when converting the varchar value 'RR' to data type int.' I can't understand why the value ID = 'ERR' should be being considered for conversion because the predicate ID LIKE 'A[0-9][0-9]' should have removed the invalid row from the resultset. When the base table is substituted with an equivalent CTE the problem goes away i.e. WITH IDs (ID) AS ( SELECT 'A01' UNION ALL SELECT 'A02' UNION ALL SELECT 'A04' UNION ALL SELECT 'ERR' ), ValidIDs (ID, seq) AS ( SELECT ID, CAST(RIGHT(ID, 2) AS INTEGER) FROM IDs WHERE ID LIKE 'A[0-9][0-9]' ) SELECT MIN(V1.seq) + 1 AS next_seq FROM ValidIDs AS V1 WHERE NOT EXISTS ( SELECT * FROM ValidIDs AS V2 WHERE V2.seq = V1.seq + 1 ); Why would a base table cause this error? Is this a known issue? UPDATE @sgmoore: no, doing the filtering in one CTE and the casting in another CTE still results in the same error e.g. WITH FilteredIDs (ID) AS ( SELECT ID FROM IDs WHERE ID LIKE 'A[0-9][0-9]' ), ValidIDs (ID, seq) AS ( SELECT ID, CAST(RIGHT(ID, 2) AS INTEGER) FROM FilteredIDs ) SELECT MIN(V1.seq) + 1 AS next_seq FROM ValidIDs AS V1 WHERE NOT EXISTS ( SELECT * FROM ValidIDs AS V2 WHERE V2.seq = V1.seq + 1 );