Summary

In today's lesson, you learned about the new feature in SQL Server 2000 that enables you to create user-defined functions. You have seen how powerful UDFs are in providing expanded capabilities to you and your users. They will take a little practice to get used to, but I predict that user-defined functions will be one of the most often used additions to SQL Server 2000.

If you return a single value from your function, it is called a scalar function. If you return a table with a simple SELECT statement, your function is known as an inline table value function. The SELECT statement defines the table being returned. If the table is defined not by the SELECT statement, but explicitly in the function itself, it is called a multi-statement table value function.