Hi

Interestingly enough I tried a similar test on 2012 for the originals and got elapsed times that so close as to be the same. It may have been the strings I was using though.

Bring on a PATREPLACE function 😀

ChrisM's pattern splitter from Dwain's article [/url]may also be able to be used here

select cleanedstring

FROM #strings s

CROSS APPLY (

SELECT Item + '' FROM PatternSplitCM(string,'[^0-9]') WHERE MATCHED = 0 FOR XML PATH ('')

) x (cleanedstring)