Great article Gregory!

The one thing that really jumps out to me is the fact that you moved away from using UDFs as most of the articles out there explain APPLY statements using UDFs.

If only I had come across this article earlier, I wouldn't have taken so long to wrap my head around the real difference between the logical JOINs (OUTER and INNER) and the APPLY statements.

It is unfortunate however that a lot of people do not know about the APPLY functionality in SQL 2005 or are simply unaware that such a thing (or ROW_NUMBER) exists and that these would eliminate a lot of hair pulling and teeth gritting!