Danny, Ron and Tom - Thanks to all for giving it a go.
The history of this was that I was playing around with passing subqueries to TVFs, hoping for a shortcut to passing a table into the function. In the past, I've done this with XML and I was hoping there might be a more efficient way than SELECT/INSERTing into a table variable first and then calling the function with the table variable. Alas, that was not to be.
My thought question: Have you ever been told that your query runs too fast?
My advice:
INDEXing a poor-performing query is like putting sugar on cat food. Yeah, it probably tastes better but are you sure you want to eat it?
The path of least resistance can be a slippery slope. Take care that fixing your fixes of fixes doesn't snowball and end up costing you more than fixing the root cause would have in the first place.
Need to UNPIVOT? Why not CROSS APPLY VALUES instead?[/url]
Since random numbers are too important to be left to chance, let's generate some![/url]
Learn to understand recursive CTEs by example.[/url]
[url url=http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/St