Gentlemen... so sorry I'm late to the party!
Paul White recently turned me on to SQL# and I just happened to do a comparison of the SQL# RegEx string splitter against a pattern splitting function in the article I authored (fourth link in my signature line).
You can see those performance results here: http://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic1390297-3122-5.aspx
Just hoping to make a very minor contribution to this most interesting article and thread. Thanks to a good friend (you know who you are) for tuning me in to this.
My thought question: Have you ever been told that your query runs too fast?
My advice:
INDEXing a poor-performing query is like putting sugar on cat food. Yeah, it probably tastes better but are you sure you want to eat it?
The path of least resistance can be a slippery slope. Take care that fixing your fixes of fixes doesn't snowball and end up costing you more than fixing the root cause would have in the first place.
Need to UNPIVOT? Why not CROSS APPLY VALUES instead?[/url]
Since random numbers are too important to be left to chance, let's generate some![/url]
Learn to understand recursive CTEs by example.[/url]
[url url=http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/St