**Why STUFF + FOR XML PATH:** SQL Server pattern for string aggregation pre-2017. Builds comma-separated lists, XML fragments. Replaced by STRING_AGG in modern SQL.
**Syntax:** STUFF(string, start, length, replace)—replaces chars. Combined with FOR XML PATH(''): concatenates rows into string; STUFF removes leading comma.
**Scalability:** FOR XML PATH scans all rows—O(n). For large aggregations (100K+ rows per group), consider CLR aggregate or application-layer concatenation....
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