Comments on: When is a SQL function not a function?

By: Cade Roux

Cade Roux — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 19:17:43 +0000

I always thought inline TVFs should have been named parametrized views and grouped with them instead. Their treatment by the optimizer and performance profile is much more closely aligned with that.
I very much hope one day we will get inline scalar functions. It is a shame that very simple utility scalar functions are so much more easily outperformed by inline code. For maintainability, sometimes some simple scalar functions can be very useful – it would be nice if you didn’t have to take such a performance hit to use them.

By: Rob Farley

Rob Farley — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 08:53:43 +0000

Thanks everyone. I’m going to write a follow-up to this about the use of stored procedures in SSRS. It’ll be a little controversial. But I’m moving house this week, so it might not be for a few days.
And ALZDBA – it could be okay, perhaps something along the lines of "You’re not what you appear to be, you shouldn’t run procedurally" 🙂

By: ALZDBA

ALZDBA — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 22:56:47 +0000

Great post ! Very informative.
A ref to keep at hand.
[i]It will be a heck of a job to put that to a guitar tune :-)[/i]

By: Joe Celko

Joe Celko — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 18:12:07 +0000

Nice article. I alwasy felt that the UDF was added to make proceural programmers feel good and to help them avoid learning declarative programming 🙂

By: John Hennesey

John Hennesey — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 16:49:11 +0000

Very nice post! I have had to explain this numerous times to folks when their query takes > 30 mins to run and by inlining things it goes down to 5-10 seconds. Now I can stop explaining and refer them to this post. 🙂 thank you very much!

By: wilfred van dijk

wilfred van dijk — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 10:53:39 +0000

Impressive under-the-hood information about the dark side of functions!