Not All SQL Server Function Rewrites Are Straightforward

And Some, Not At All

Let’s say at some point, you just didn’t know any better, and you wrote a scalar function to make some common thing you needed to do all “modular” and “portable” and stuff.

Good on you, not repeating yourself. Apparently I repeat myself for a living.

Anyway, you know what stinks? When you hit divide by zero errors. It’d be cool if math fixed that for us.

Does anyone know how I can get in touch with math?

Uncle Function

Since you’re a top programmer, you know about this sort of stuff. So you write a bang-up function to solve the problem.

Maybe it looks something like this.

CREATE OR ALTER FUNCTION dbo.safety_dance(@n1 INT, @n2 INT)
RETURNS INT
WITH SCHEMABINDING,
     RETURNS NULL ON NULL INPUT
AS
BEGIN
RETURN
(
    SELECT @n1 / NULLIF(@n2, 0)
);
END
GO

You may even be able to call it in queries about like this.

SELECT TOP (5)
    u.DisplayName,
    fudge = dbo.safety_dance(SUM(u.UpVotes), COUNT(*))
FROM dbo.Users AS u
GROUP BY u.DisplayName
ORDER BY fudge DESC;

The problem is that it makes this query take a long time.

At 23 seconds, this is probably unacceptable. And this is on SQL Server 2019, too. The function inlining thing doesn’t quite help us, here.

One feature restriction is this, so we uh… Yeah.

The UDF does not contain aggregate functions being passed as parameters to a scalar UDF

But we’re probably good query tuners, and we know we can write inline functions.

Ankle Fraction

This is a simple enough function. Let’s get to it.

CREATE OR ALTER FUNCTION dbo.safety_dance_inline(@n1 INT, @n2 INT)
RETURNS TABLE
WITH SCHEMABINDING
AS
RETURN
(
    SELECT @n1 / NULLIF(@n2, 0) AS safety
);

Will it be faster?

SELECT TOP (5)
    u.DisplayName,
    fudge = (SELECT * FROM dbo.safety_dance_inline(SUM(u.UpVotes), COUNT(*))) 
FROM dbo.Users AS u
GROUP BY u.DisplayName
ORDER BY fudge DESC;

Well, yes. Mostly because it throws an error.

Msg 4101, Level 15, State 1, Line 35
Aggregates on the right side of an APPLY cannot reference columns from the left side.

Well that’s weird. Who even knows what that means? There’s no apply, here.

What’s your problem, SQL Server?

Fixing It

To get around this restriction, we need to also rewrite the query. We can either use a CTE, or  a derived table.

--A CTE
WITH counts AS 
(
    SELECT 
        u.DisplayName, 
        SUM(Upvotes) AS Upvotes,
        COUNT(*) AS records
    FROM dbo.Users AS u
    GROUP BY u.DisplayName
) 
SELECT TOP(5) 
    c.DisplayName,
    fudge = (SELECT * FROM dbo.safety_dance_inline(c.Upvotes, c.records) AS s)
FROM counts AS c
ORDER BY fudge DESC;

--A derived table
SELECT TOP(5) 
    c.DisplayName,
    fudge = (SELECT * FROM dbo.safety_dance_inline(c.Upvotes, c.records) AS s)
FROM 
(
    SELECT 
        u.DisplayName, 
        SUM(Upvotes) AS Upvotes,
        COUNT(*) AS records
    FROM dbo.Users AS u
    GROUP BY u.DisplayName
) AS c
ORDER BY fudge DESC;

Is it faster? Heck yeah it is.

Thanks for reading!

Going Further

If this is the kind of SQL Server stuff you love learning about, you’ll love my training. I’m offering a 75% discount to my blog readers if you click from here. I’m also available for consulting if you just don’t have time for that and need to solve performance problems quickly.