Tuesday, April 7, 2009

What is User Defined Functions? What kind of User‐Defined Functions can be created?

User‐Defined Functions allow defining its own T‐SQL functions that can accept 0 or more parameters and return a single scalar data value or a table data type.
Different Kinds of User‐Defined Functions created are:

Scalar User‐Defined Function

A Scalar user‐defined function returns one of the scalar data types. Text, ntext, image and timestamp data types are not supported. These are the type of user‐defined functions that most developers are used to in other programming languages. You pass in 0 to many parameters and you get a return value.

Inline Table‐Value User‐Defined Function
An Inline Table‐Value user‐defined function returns a table data type and is an exceptional alternative to a view as the user‐defined function can pass parameters into a T‐SQL select command and in essence provide us with a parameterized, non‐updateable view of the underlying tables.

Multi‐statement Table‐Value User‐Defined Function
A Multi‐Statement Table‐Value user‐defined function returns a table and is also an exceptional alternative to a view as the function can support multiple T‐SQL statements to build the final result where the view is limited to a single SELECT statement. Also, the ability to pass parameters into a TSQL select command or a group of them gives us the capability to in essence create a parameterized, non‐updateable view of the data in the underlying tables. Within the create function command you must define the table structure that is being returned. After creating this type of user‐defined function, It can be used in the FROM clause of a T‐SQL command unlike the behavior found when using a stored procedure which can also return record sets.

No comments:

Post a Comment