Inside Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005

Table-Valued UDFs

Table-valued UDFs are UDFs that return a table and are typically specified in the FROM clause of an outer query. This section will describe inline table-valued UDFs, multistatement table-valued UDFs, and CLR table-valued UDFs.

Inline Table-Valued UDFs

Inline table-valued UDFs are similar to views in the sense that their returned table is defined by a query specification. However, the UDF’s query can refer to input parameters, while a view cannot. So you can think of an inline UDF as a "parameterized view." SQL Server actually treats inline UDFs very similarly to views. The query processor replaces an Inline UDF reference with its definition; in other words, the query processor "expands" the UDF definition and generates an execution ...