Ok, let's go with that. Thanks for persisting 🙂

CREATE ASSEMBLY...

Are you expecting the "A,B,C,D," to produce 5 records?

To me, the trailing comma is delimiting the 'D' and so should not result...

Not sure I agree - a single trailing delimiter shouldn't return an extra blank record, should...

A very good article - I have no idea why it's rating is so low.

Well done.

I try to avoid NULLs, as far as is practicable, in my designs. They complicate coding and often result in suboptimal query performance.

In suitable cases, I have no problem...

Steve,

I found a few spare minutes to slightly modify Adam's routine to work the way you want:

CREATE ASSEMBLY Utility

AUTHORIZATION dbo

FROM ...

Another option using EXISTS:

SELECT *

FROM dbo.Test T1

WHERE EXISTS

(

SELECT...

Well the credit is Adam's...

Neither scalar nor multi-statement UDFs show in IO stats. In-line TVFs do, because they are expanded into the query (just like a parameterized view would) before optimization.

You can't create temporary functions, no.

It sounds as if you are writing code to concatenate strings, perhaps to create a CSV-style output?

There is an excellent performance comparison of the main...

On my machine, the fastest solution is based on Adam Machanic's excellent CLR string splitter. I include it here for others to compare:

CREATE ASSEMBLY Utility

...

An excessive number of columns in a GROUP BY clause is almost always a sign of a database design or query that has considerable scope for improvement 🙂

Often, the GROUP...

There's no functional difference, it's just a scripting quirk.

Partitioning does not require a clustered index at all.

Here's a script I use to demonstrate that fact.

It also demonstrates the indexed view switching possible in SQL Server 2008.

If you are...

Bit late to the party, but just for the record - I'm not a DBA either.