First off, I would like to say good job, I don't think most of us appreciate the hard word that goes into these articles.

The only item I will nit-pick is the use of the function with the "customerid" being passed it. Appreciating that with the amount of data you have the difference is negligible, I have had to fix way too many of these since functions came into being in SQL 2000.

To your yoda quote "you must unlearn what you have learned", inside a function if you need to select as you do from a table you have effectively created the very cursor you are trying to avoid since SQL will call the function row by row with 1 ID at a time. The queries will generally scale better with more liberal use of temp/variable tables although they also have their limits. However what is the worst thing about the functions is that they are hidden in the execution plans, which can make them a real bugger to find sometimes.