Maybe I'm reading it wrong, but short of going into CLR (which I personally try to avoid for maintainability) CTE dosen't seem to be much slower?

I mostly liked the link...

Bit of a late answer, but found this usefull when I had this same problem.

http://www.syntaxwarriors.com/2012/t-sql-splitting-strings-into-multiple-rows/%5B/url%5D

Even has an example of how to make sure that any other columns of data are...