L' Eomot Inversé (9/23/2012)

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I think you misunderstood me Paul - my fault for not expressing myself more clearly.

rragnmo seemed to me to be talking about two distinct thigs - a chunk of pure C# measured on its own (his first paragraph) and a CLR function embedded into SQL (his second paragraph). I was concerned only with his second paragraph. When an attempt is made to do the whole thing in c# (or Fortran, or any other procedural language) there's a risk that the optimiser notices that the first one million minus one function calls are irrelevant so it leaves them out. This doesn't happen with SQL, currently (but it might in the furture) so generally there';s an attempt to prevent the optimiser from doing this to avoid meaningless comparisons. My "one multiplication" was for the whole process, which needed only one multiplication (probably actually a left shift, depending on the target machine, as it's a multiplication by 2) instead of a million multiplications. If that sort of optimisation was happening, we would be comparing a forest with a single tree.