This function was added in SQL Server 2016 and removes the need for user code to break a list of strings into a table of values.

The caveat is that the syntax isn’t quite what you would expect. I’ve had to remind myself about this a couple times, so I’m posting it here.

SELECT VALUE FROM STRING_SPLIT(‘1,2,3’, ‘,’);

I sometimes find it frustrating, searching through messages boards while trying to figure out how to do a specific thing. I’ll share some of my solutions here.