The good thing about hard failures is that they happen straight away in dev or at worst test environments, so production problems are rarer than soft failures that might sneak...

One thing to note about APPLY is that it will always* use a Nested Loops operator to handle joining the rows, so it's generally a bad idea if you're expecting...

Sad day, he as a very smart...

The official documentation refers to them as functions. I suspect the fact they act a bit like variables, have similar syntax and the fact the correlation with ## and #...

You're using it in @tbl, but it's not escaped when you combine strings. Try printing the sql before running it.

Yes, I'd be surprised if a blanket statement such as JSON is always faster than XML were true with SQL Server, nothing is ever quite that simple. Using a table...

It doesn't really "prove" anything. There is already sufficient evidence in this thread that you've not configured SQL Server very well for the limited hardware spec you're running on (hint:...