Split Comma Separated Data Into A Table

(Ben Taylor) SQL Server is an engine that works best when processing sets of data. It has long been proven that SQL Server performance is increased when processing data in sets rather than one single row at a time. Stored procedures do not allow a for table input parameters. As a result we have resulted to sending data as XML and converting it into a table using Open Query or sending the data as a single string with delimiters for the individual attributes. There are many articles demonstrating parsing a delimited string into attributes and processing the resulting data set or individual records. This article explores the new Ranking function ROW_NUMBER resulting in an optimized method of parsing a delimited string into a table.