Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000 Unleashed, Second Edition

Rewriting Stored Procedures as Functions

In previous releases of SQL Server, if you wanted to do custom processing, you had to create stored procedures to do things that would have worked better as functions. For example, you couldn't use the result set of a stored procedure in a where clause or a return value as a column in a select list. Using a stored procedure to perform calculations on columns in a result set often required using a cursor to step through each row in a result set and pass the column values fetched to the stored procedure, which typically returned the computed value via an output parameter. Another alternative was to retrieve the initial result set into a temporary table and then perform additional queries/updates against ...