Pass the function a string, it returns an integer hash of the string. If you don't need to match Java, use the T-SQL binary_checksum() function, which will be much faster. (By the way, it looks like binary_checksum() uses a very similar algorithm: for all caps string, I get very similar results if instead of the "@h*31" in the code above I use "@h*16", and instead of "%4294967296" use "%4294967295". There must be something else too...).
Example:
select dbo.UTIL_JAVA_HASHCODE('abC1234567');
