Andy Levy has a T-SQL programming breakthrough:
Finally, this week I had a breakthrough. I was working on updating a bunch of data but it was breaking on a small subset of that data. In this case, I was attempting to
JOINtwo tables on fields that should have beenINTs, but in a very small number of cases one side was using a comma-delimited string. The user told me that someone else had done these updates in the past and didn’t encounter the problem I was having (so I knew that it was something i was doing “wrong”), but given that it was only a handful of broken updates she was OK with manually doing the updates (we were scripting it because we were updating potentially tens of thousands of records).I am not OK with manually fixing this in the future. I wanted to know how the other DBA had done it before. I dug into some history and found
CROSS APPLY. My nemesis. I was determined to figure out how to use it this time.
The APPLY operator is extremely powerful in the right set of circumstances. Andy shows the “classic” use case, but there are a number of other uses for the operator.