SQL Server 2008 Extended Events. It's a high-performance, feature-rich, and extremely useful tracing system. Too bad it's so difficult to figure out how to use it! Or is it? Earlier this week Jonathan Kehayias announced his SSMS addin for Extended Events, which makes it super-easy to create and manage events, and even view the raw event data. ...

So I was doing some research on which is the best way to pass multiple-valued parameters into a stored procedure or user-defined function when I found some interesting results. I had always used a string-based user-defined function to parse a delimited list of values and I knew I could use XML to do the same thing, yet I had never compared the two ...