SQL sucks at string manipulation. It’s not just SQL Server, it’s the SQL language in general. I’ve mentioned this before on Stack Overflow in answer to the question “What are five things you hate about your favorite language?” It’s almost easier to return the raw rows to application code than it is to work with them inside of a database. There’s one place where SQL Server has made it easier to work with string data – string building.
This site is protected with Urban Giraffe's plugin 'HTML Purified' and Edward Z. Yang's 
. 401 items have been purified.