Recursive Queries Using Common Table Expressions

Just started playing with recursive Queries in SQL2008. Microsoft has some useful documentation.zzz

List manipulation in SQL

Here are a three functions for list manipulation using SQL.

@RowData is the name of a column.

@SplitOn is the list delimiter (eg comma, period, space etc)

Get the first item:

ltrim(rtrim(Substring(@RowData,1,Charindex(@SplitOn,@RowData)-1)))

Get the last item:

right(@RowData, charindex('.', reverse(@RowData), 1) - 1)

Get the list without the first item:
Substring(@RowData,Charindex(@SplitOn,@RowData)+1,len(@RowData))

These are the equivalent of ColdFusion's ListFirst(), ListLast() and ListRest() functions.