The performance isn't necessarily all bad. I had a query in which a large portion of it was splitting a delimited string into multiple columns. I originally used a function I used on SQL 2000 which was basically a loop using CHARINDEX and SUBSTRING to iterate over each "column" in the string and split it into a table. I rewrote the function to use a recursive CTE rather than the loop, but everything else was essentially the same. The stored procedure I was using it in that was taking over 50 minutes. After that single change, it was running around 16 minutes.