How do you count the number of occurrences of a certain substring in a SQL varchar?

The first way that comes to mind is to do it indirectly by replacing the comma with an empty string and comparing the lengths

Declare @string varchar(1000)
Set @string = 'a,b,c,d'
select len(@string) - len(replace(@string, ',', ''))

Quick extension of cmsjr's answer that works for strings with more than one character.

CREATE FUNCTION dbo.CountOccurrencesOfString
(
    @searchString nvarchar(max),
    @searchTerm nvarchar(max)
)
RETURNS INT
AS
BEGIN
    return (LEN(@searchString)-LEN(REPLACE(@searchString,@searchTerm,'')))/LEN(@searchTerm)
END

Usage:

SELECT * FROM MyTable
where dbo.CountOccurrencesOfString(MyColumn, 'MyString') = 1

You can compare the length of the string with one where the commas are removed:

len(value) - len(replace(value,',',''))