Great article. If you have to parse strings in SQL then having the tally table is great.

I would have appraoched the problem with a different tool set.

SELECT '|' + CountryName + '|' FROM Country

This would have shown me that there were hidden characters. Pasting a snipet into my favorite text editor and hovering over one of the bad apples whould have gotten me to writing the replace statement.

Yet since you have to show the value of Tally I think that you did it very well. I'm looking forward to the next installment. I'm still trying to sell certain managament of the value of Tally and Dates.