Agree with IanS re the first example. The second one is fine for storing values but is trivial - everyone knows that you can store data in a table or table variable, and using a pair of index values as a composite key is an obvious thng to do under any circumstances to which this solution is relevant.

The delimited (or fixed-width member) string approaches and my preferred XML (not a string!) solution are used not because SQL programmers didn't think of using a table (!!!), but because using permanent or temp tables is a clunky way of implementing arrays and there are extreme limitations on using table variables to pass arrays between code entities in TSQL, and between TSQL and other code structures with which the database needs to communicate.

Sorry to be so critical but this is not a useful article.