This is clever and a little more flexible than some of the other techniques - and useful if all you need to do is return the output directly to the caller. But the weakness is that the dynamic SQL means it can't be moved to a function - using a procedure really limits what you can do with the output. I've had very good results that use a table-valued function and a numbers table to parse lists, and then the TVF results can be used in JOINs and other structs, unlike the output of a stored procedure (which can only be dumped to a temp table if further processing or filtering is required).