SQL - STRING from TableA passed to TableB as INT

Question

I have two tables, TableA and TableB .

• TableA has ItemA as NVARCHAR(MAX) = "1234,1235,1253,1643,2374".
• TableB has ItemB as INT(MAX) .

What I need is to pass the STRING from TableA to TableB and insert each element into a new row.

Is there a quicker method to do this instead of iterating through the STRING and comma separating?

I would pass it in as an Array or List but that cannot be done.

Answer 1

Using a CTE, the following should work:

Schema

CREATE TABLE tbl1 (
  ItemA nvarchar(max))

INSERT INTO tbl1 VALUES ('1234,1235,1253,1643,2374')

Query

;WITH tmp(Item, ItemA) as (
    SELECT LEFT(ItemA, CHARINDEX(',',ItemA+',')-1),
        STUFF(ItemA, 1, CHARINDEX(',',ItemA+','), '')
    FROM tbl1
    UNION ALL
    SELECT LEFT(ItemA, CHARINDEX(',',ItemA+',')-1),
        STUFF(ItemA, 1, CHARINDEX(',',ItemA+','), '')
    FROM tmp
    WHERE ItemA > ''
)
INSERT INTO TableB (ItemB) SELECT Item FROM tmp

Fiddle