With a colleague, I've been researching CROSS/OUTER APPLY, however, we're having trouble coming up with practical applications.
I've looked at When should I utilize Cross Apply over Inner Join? quite a bit. and searching, but the primary (only) case seems somewhat odd (using the row count from a table to determine how many rows to select from another table).
I believed the following case may profit from OUTER APPLY:
Information Table (contains 1 record for each contact) Table of Communication Entries (can contain n phone, fax, or email from each contact) But using subqueries, common table expressions, OUTER JOIN with RANK() and OUTER APPLY all seem to perform equally. I'm guessing this means the scenario isn't applicable to APPLY.
Please refer to some real-life examples.