CTE to Split a String in a function SplitString

Back in 2012 when I was writing my Common Table Expressions book, I came up with the following CTE in a function to split a string into rows.

CREATE FUNCTION dbo.Split (@sep char(1), @s varchar(8000))
RETURNS table
AS
RETURN (
    WITH splitter_cte AS (
      SELECT CHARINDEX(@sep, @s) as pos, 0 as lastPos
      UNION ALL
      SELECT CHARINDEX(@sep, @s, pos + 1), pos
      FROM splitter_cte
      WHERE pos > 0
    )
    SELECT SUBSTRING(@s, lastPos + 1,
                     case when pos = 0 then 80000
                     else pos - lastPos -1 end) as chunk
    FROM splitter_cte
  )
GO
 
SELECT *
  FROM dbo.Split(' ', 'the quick brown dog jumped over the lazy fox')
OPTION(MAXRECURSION 0);

Original Post: http://stevestedman.com/2012/04/using-a-cte-to-split-a-string-into-rows/

At the time, I thought it was pretty handy function, I ended up including it as an example in my CTE book, and I have used it dozens of times over the last couple of years.

SQL Server 2016

In SQL Server 2016 Microsoft has introduced a built in function called STRING_SPLIT which is very similar to this example. If you are using SQL Server 2016 you may want to consider the STRING_SPLIT function instead. The examples shown here work great and have been tested on SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2008, SQL Server 2008R2, SQL Server 2012, SQL Server 2014 and SQL Server 2016. If Microsoft has done it right in SQL Server 2016, I would expect that their version of SPLIT_STRING will have better performance.

Performance with splitting strings

This last week I was working with a client who had a performance issue on a SSRS report that took over an hour to run, the person working on the report did an excellent job tracking it down. In SSRS when you have the option to select multiple items from a list with a check box, the id’s from those items are passed in to the report as a string that is comma separated. Something like this:

“12334, 34234, 2342332, 234234, 23423”

In order to use that in a query it needs to be split out into something that can easily be used. The way I have typically seen this done is with a split function like the one above. They had a split function but it didn’t use a CTE, instead the function used a loop to iterate through the list and break it up into rows.

SELECT * FROM originalSplitFunction('12334, 34234, 2342332, 234234, 23423', ',')
[sql]

Worked great stand alone, it ran in far less than a second.

The person working on the report had narrowed down the query to something like this:
[sql]
SELECT some columns
FROM Table1 as t1
INNER JOIN Table2 as t2 on t1.id = t2.foreignKeyValue
INNER JOIN originalSplitFunction('12334, 34234, 2342332, 234234, 23423', ',') as s 
           on s.id = t2.id;

Which took over an hour to run. He had also through some testing with hard coded values determined that the following ran in just a second.

SELECT some columns
FROM Table1 as t1
INNER JOIN Table2 as t2 on t1.id = t2.foreignKeyValue
INNER JOIN t2.id in (12334, 34234, 2342332, 234234, 23423)

In this case Table1 and Table2 were both very large tables, with some great indexes.

Why did it take so long to run with the originalSplitFunction?

Here is what I knew as we started looking into it:

• The originalSplitFunction when included in the query took over an hour to run.
• The originalSplitFunction contained multiple statements with a loop and some work to fill up the result table.
• The SQL Server query optimizer treats multiple statement table valued functions as a black box when analyzing the plan. The optimizer doesn’t know anything about how the function works, or how many results will be returned.
• The SQL Server query optimizer is able to use single statement table valued functions when analyzing the plan, therefore if we have a string split function that is a single statement, we should be able to end up with a better plan.
• The use of the originalSplitFunction is causing a full table scan on a very large table.

The new and improved function

That’s the point that I remembered my split function using a CTE that only has a single statement. We grabbed the split function from my blog, and with some minor adjustments to handle VARCHAR(MAX), we ended up with the following function.

CREATE FUNCTION dbo.SplitString (@s VARCHAR(MAX), @sep CHAR(1))
RETURNS TABLE
AS
-- SplitString function created by Steve Stedman
RETURN (
WITH splitter_cte AS
(
  SELECT CHARINDEX(@sep, @s) as pos, cast(0 AS BIGINT) as lastPos
  UNION ALL
  SELECT CHARINDEX(@sep, @s, pos + 1), pos
  FROM splitter_cte
  WHERE pos > 0
)
, splitter2_cte AS
(
  SELECT ltrim(rtrim(SUBSTRING(@s, lastPos + 1,
  case when pos = 0 then 80000000000
  else pos - lastPos -1 end))) as chunk
  FROM splitter_cte
)
SELECT chunk as chunk
  FROM splitter2_cte
 WHERE NULLIF(chunk, '') IS NOT NULL
)
GO

SELECT *
FROM dbo.SplitString('the quick brown dog jumped over the lazy fox', ' ')
OPTION(MAXRECURSION 0);

When we replaced the originalSplitFunction with the SplitString function the query ran in about a second. From 1 hour down to a second run time for a report. I hope someone notices that improvement.

Related Links:

• Original Post: http://stevestedman.com/2012/04/using-a-cte-to-split-a-string-into-rows/

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