Ignore the previous entry, this is much closer:

SELECT 
    MAX(CASE WHEN DS2.ItemNumber = 1 THEN DS2.Item ELSE '' END) AS Id,
   ...

Something like this?!  It's only a start, obviously.

SELECT DS2.*
FROM dbo.DelimitedSplit8K(@text, '|') DS1
CROSS APPLY dbo.DelimitedSplit8K(DS1.Item, ',') DS2

Yep.  You'll need to go thru each "What's New" separately, for:

SQL Server 2012; 2014; and 2016.

Interesting q.  I've been looking into this, the best try I've found so far is to skew the row and page stats so high that SQL will almost certainly (?)...

I...

In the WHEN MATCHED part of the MERGE, specify only the columns you want UPDATEd.

OK, let's make a couple of quick fixes and then do a quick check for a couple of common errors, and see if we can find any bad data after...

COALESCE(partially_NULL_column, joined_table.column, another_column_in_table_thats_never_null)

webrunner:

You'd get orders of magnitude more improvement by changing all tables to make sure they have the best clustered index for overall performance and based on how data is (almost) always...

Q1) Potentially, if the length of the varchar update was longer than the original status length.  For example, if the first status was 'New' but a later status was 'Updated',...

STRING_SPLIT also does not guarantee the order of the strings returned (in keeping with relational theory).  That is, you can't be sure that the 10th value that comes out will...

but it seems that DBAs who manage tons of servers have come up with a set of scripts (based on DMVs or other ways of getting insert/update metrics) they can...

Hmm, maybe I misunderstand, I thought the OP said that it was just that one query for the max date, ~ every hour, in order to provide that value to...

Given that the table had no index at all, I didn't think in this case that making the clus index unique was necessary, particularly to the...

I'd probably just add a trigger to the table to capture the max value(s) in a separate table so that it was always available.  All you have to check for...