It’s much better now since SQL Server 2017 added a new string split function. But I actually had to do basically the same thing in an earlier version of SQL Ser

It’s much better now since SQL Server 2017 added a new string split function. But I actually had to do basically the same thing in an earlier version of SQL Server (in my case, it was because I was interacting with a legacy application that spits out pipe-delimited strings) and the string parsing increased the execution time by several orders of magnitude.