Function vs. Stored Procedure in SQL Server

Functions and stored procedures serve separate purposes. Although it's not the best analogy, functions can be viewed literally as any other function you'd use in any programming language, but stored procs are more like individual programs or a batch script.

Functions normally have an output and optionally inputs. The output can then be used as the input to another function (a SQL Server built-in such as DATEDIFF, LEN, etc) or as a predicate to a SQL Query - e.g., SELECT a, b, dbo.MyFunction(c) FROM table or SELECT a, b, c FROM table WHERE a = dbo.MyFunc(c).

Stored procs are used to bind SQL queries together in a transaction, and interface with the outside world. Frameworks such as ADO.NET, etc. can't call a function directly, but they can call a stored proc directly.

Functions do have a hidden danger though: they can be misused and cause rather nasty performance issues: consider this query:

SELECT * FROM dbo.MyTable WHERE col1 = dbo.MyFunction(col2)

Where MyFunction is declared as:

CREATE FUNCTION MyFunction (@someValue INTEGER) RETURNS INTEGER
AS
BEGIN
   DECLARE @retval INTEGER
   SELECT localValue
      FROM dbo.localToNationalMapTable
      WHERE nationalValue = @someValue
   RETURN @retval
END

What happens here is that the function MyFunction is called for every row in the table MyTable. If MyTable has 1000 rows, then that's another 1000 ad-hoc queries against the database. Similarly, if the function is called when specified in the column spec, then the function will be called for each row returned by the SELECT.

So you do need to be careful writing functions. If you do SELECT from a table in a function, you need to ask yourself whether it can be better performed with a JOIN in the parent stored proc or some other SQL construct (such as CASE ... WHEN ... ELSE ... END).