Jeff Moden (11/29/2012)
Lynn Pettis (11/28/2012)
Combined some of the code from your code in this article with your delimited split routine to solve a problem at work. Inspiration comes from many places.Have to give it to you Jeff, you are the Mentor of the Year in my book.
:blush: Thanks, Lynn. I really appreciate that. What did you end up doing?
Needed to sort DD Version Keys (x.x.x, like 2.1.10). The original code had no problems as it didn't have to work with a 2 digit value. When we went to 2.1.10 instead of 2.3.1, it was a problem. The original solution by another DBA used the OLE Automation Procedures to create a regex_replace function. Only problem is that there is a STIG requiring that these procedures be disabled.
I'm sure there may be another solution, but combining the DelimitedSplit8K and the varbinary concatenation from this article I was able to generate a solution that correctly sorted the version keys, including a very unlikely set of numerical elements (x(n).x(n).x(n).x(n).x(n).x(n).x(n).x(n).x(n).x(n).x(n)) where n represents 1 or more digits.
I wouldn't have thought of concatenating varbinary values had I not read this article.