>By the way, on a less important note....I've discovered recently (and a recent post by Boris reminded me), it's not necessary to use the FOR XML trick to simply generate a string of values.
>
>Just as a simple example....using the ShipMethod table in Adventureworks....I used to do this...
>
>

>declare   @ShipMethodNameList nvarchar(1000) = ''
>set @ShipMethodNameList = 
>      stuff (  (  select distinct ',[' +  
>           cast(ShipMethodID as varchar(100))  +
>               '] as [' + Name + ']'     
>               from Purchasing.ShipMethod 
>                        for xml path('') ), 1, 1, '')
>

>
>That certainly works, but usually can be done simply by doing this...where SQL Server will concatenate the string for each row the engine encounters.
>
>

>declare @otherlist varchar(8000) = ''
>select @OtherList = @OtherList + '['  + cast(ShipMethodID as varchar(2)) + '] as [' + Name + '],' 
>        from Purchasing.ShipMethod
>
>set @OtherList = substring(@OtherList,1,len(@OtherList)-1)
>

>
>The FOR XML PATH has great uses, but in this case it can also be done a bit easier.

This is undocumented feature and should not be used. First of all, it doesn't respect the ORDER BY, secondly it has problems with NULL values. So, I would not recommend to do this in a production code.

You may check MSDN T-SQL forum and posts by Erland Sommarskog if you don't believe me.