Thank you, Mike - this is one of the most useful and best-written articles I've ever seen on a practical SQL Server topic.

I admit to being guilty of using a procedure method of doing the digest-the-delimited-list thing. As of tomorrow moring, I'm switching to your technique.

I really like the idea of using auxilliary tables like this for set-based, rather than procedural data manipulation. I, too, have to credit Joe Celko with that idea - I read about calendar tables in one of his articles.

In my current project, which involves writting stored procedures to feed Crystal Reports, I found that I could use a calendar table coupled with a cross-join to do in a fraction of a second what had been done earlier with time-consuming, loop-di-loop procedural code.

I recommend that anyone who hasn't tried this powerful duo of auxilliary tables (numbers, calendar, etc) and cross-joins try it out

Regards,

SteveR