Great article, this may solve the problem I had with this code that would have been considerably faster than Coalesce.

-- create list to pivot hist data

SELECT @DistList =

COALESCE(@DistList + ',[', '[') +

CAST(Dist AS VarCHAR(85)) + ']'

FROM (

SELECT top 1000 Disty

FROM @t1

Order by Disty

) t(Dist)

-- try for XML to speed up the coalesce -- may bug on Shangai P&S

--Select @DistList = (

--SELECT Disty + ', ' As [text()]

--FROM @t1

--ORDER BY Disty

--FOR XML PATH('')

--)

--Set @DistList = LEFT(@DistList, Len (@DistList) -1)