Split delimiter-separated lists in SQL Server

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This function is useful for splitting a string of values delimited by a special character; e.g., a comma. I recently had a case where the list of employees for a department needed to be inserted into a table. The employee names were in a string delimited by commas. Separating these names in Visual Basic and inserting them into the database involved many database hits. Instead, I passed the string to the following stored procedure. The stored procedure split the string and inserted each employee name along with department name into the database.

This script has been tested on SQL server 7.0. Note that it takes ' '(space) also as a delimiter.

To test the procedure:

or

I decided to implement the process in this tip as a function.

The benefits of this method are that it doesn't use tempdb (so it won't be affected by anything that may lock tempdb), it is slightly faster, and you can use the function just like any other table -- for example, select c.* from customers c where c.city in (select item from fnSplit('Dallas,New York,Chicago',',') )

Here's the code:

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151;David B.

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