The article referred to by Jeff is extremely interesting, and I will definitely make use of this technique.

However, I don't think a subquery solution is always bad. It would very...

A correlated subquery is the way to go. They can be very useful.

select

ID

, ProjectPeriodID

, ItemisedGrantID

, Amount

, ISNULL (

(

-- This does the correlated sub query

SELECT sum (amount)

from ProjectPeriod c

where c.ItemisedGrantID...

How about converting the int to a varchar with a leading and trailling comma.

Add a leading and trailing comma to the positions list

and use charindex to see if the...

I don't think the string processing is a problem, but the query would a) not work properly or b) fall over due to the 8K varchar limit (as the author...