Posted by Hugo Kornelis on 10/26/06 21:46

On 26 Oct 2006 14:02:32 -0700, Alex Kuznetsov wrote:

(snip)
>What do you think?

Hi Alex,

I think that I've already summed up my idead pretty well in my previous
post. In short:

NEVER use the undocumented concatenation "tricks" in SQL Server 2000, no
matter how many people tell you to do so and no matter how often you've
seen them go right. They might go wrong and I believe that I've even
seen repro's that show that they WILL go wrong. I didn;t bookmark them,
unfortunately.

ONLY use the FOR XML PATH trick in SQL Server 2005 if you can be sure
that your data won't have any lesser-than, greater-than or ampersand
symbols or other symbols that have special meaning in XML.

In all other cases, use a userdefined function with a cursor ONLY if you
can be sure that the number of rows is so small that the performance
impact won't be too big.

--
Hugo Kornelis, SQL Server MVP

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