SQL, Auxiliary table of numbers

Question

For certain types of sql queries, an auxiliary table of numbers can be very useful. It may be created as a table with as many rows as you need for a particular task or as a

Answer 1

Still much later, I'd like to contribute a slightly different 'traditional' CTE (does not touch base tables to get the volume of rows):

--===== Hans CROSS JOINED CTE method
WITH Numbers_CTE (Digit)
AS
(SELECT 0 UNION ALL SELECT 1 UNION ALL SELECT 2 UNION ALL SELECT 3 UNION ALL SELECT 4 UNION ALL SELECT 5 UNION ALL SELECT 6 UNION ALL SELECT 7 UNION ALL SELECT 8 UNION ALL SELECT 9)
SELECT HundredThousand.Digit * 100000 + TenThousand.Digit * 10000 + Thousand.Digit * 1000 + Hundred.Digit * 100 + Ten.Digit * 10 + One.Digit AS Number
INTO #Tally5
FROM Numbers_CTE AS One CROSS JOIN Numbers_CTE AS Ten CROSS JOIN Numbers_CTE AS Hundred CROSS JOIN Numbers_CTE AS Thousand CROSS JOIN Numbers_CTE AS TenThousand CROSS JOIN Numbers_CTE AS HundredThousand

This CTE performs more READs then Itzik's CTE but less then the Traditional CTE. However, it consistently performs less WRITES then the other queries. As you know, Writes are consistently quite much more expensive then Reads.

The duration depends heavily on the number of cores (MAXDOP) but, on my 8core, performs consistently quicker (less duration in ms) then the other queries.

I am using:

Microsoft SQL Server 2012 - 11.0.5058.0 (X64) 
May 14 2014 18:34:29 
Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation
Enterprise Edition (64-bit) on Windows NT 6.3  (Build 9600: )

on Windows Server 2012 R2, 32 GB, Xeon X3450 @2.67Ghz, 4 cores HT enabled.