Looping through values stripping 1 character at a time

Please don't use loops for things like this (I'd also reserve recursive CTEs for scenarios where you have much less control over things, like hierarchies). Loops are bad in SQL; SQL is optimized to work in sets.

DECLARE @foo TABLE(ID INT);

INSERT @foo VALUES(34679),(13390),(89906);

;WITH x AS 
(
  SELECT TOP (2048) n = ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY Number)
  FROM master.dbo.spt_values ORDER BY Number
)
SELECT RIGHT(f.ID, x.n) FROM x
INNER JOIN @foo AS f
ON x.n < LEN(f.ID);

Results:

9
79
679
4679
0
90
390
3390
6
06
906
9906

• http://sqlperformance.com/generate-a-set-1
• http://sqlperformance.com/generate-a-set-2
• http://sqlperformance.com/generate-a-set-3