Ok, Oleg... not sure what the differences are between your machine and the two that I'm running but the Tally table beats the two XML methods pretty badly on both.

First, here's my Tally table setup just so we're talking apples and apples. Also, make sure you're using my test generator so you're testing for "real life" very random data with commas in different positions in each row.

--===== Do this in a nice safe place that everyone has

USE TempDB;

--===================================================================

-- Create a Tally table from 1 to 11000

--===================================================================

--===== Create and populate the Tally table on the fly.

-- This ISNULL function makes the column NOT NULL

-- so we can put a Primary Key on it

SELECT TOP 11000

IDENTITY(INT,1,1) AS N

INTO dbo.Tally

FROM Master.sys.ALL_Columns ac1

CROSS JOIN Master.sys.ALL_Columns ac2

;

--===== Add a CLUSTERED Primary Key to maximize performance

ALTER TABLE dbo.Tally

ADD CONSTRAINT PK_Tally_N

PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED (N) WITH FILLFACTOR = 100

;

--===== Allow the general public to use it

GRANT SELECT ON dbo.Tally TO PUBLIC

;

GO

Here are the run results from my desktop machine (8 year old single P4 1.8GHz 1GB Ram). Do notice the 100 element test, please. And, hell no... with speeds like that, there's no way I'm running a 1,000 element test.

Here are the exact same runs from a real server running 4 32-bit Xeons at 3GHz on Windows 2003 and SQL Server 2005 sp3 with 2GB memory allocated to SQL Server. Again... notice the 100 element runs.

I just might try the 1000 element runs on the server (well... probably NOT the XML3 version).