Aaron Bertrand and Steve Hughes talk about string splitting, and Aaron also discusses string concatenation. First Aaron:
That may not look like a massive simplification, but don’t forget about all the logic buried behind the table-valued function in the first example. And if you’re like several shops I know, if you look across your codebase and see all the messy uses you have for either of these methods, the benefits should be even more clear – and testing should bear that the performance savings compared to traditional, expensive methods are the sweetest part of the deal.
The STRING_SPLIT function will return a single column result set. The column name is “value”. The datatype will be NVARCHAR for strings that are NCHAR or NVARCHAR. VARCHAR is used for strings that are CHAR or VARCHAR types.
These two functions are small, but come in handy quite frequently.