Actually, I am not too sure to understand what the table function is doing in all this...

As for the speed, it's shockingly different!

To retrieve about 1.5 million rows using a simple TSQL UDF took about 4 minutes.

Replacing the TSQL UDF by a CLR function shrinks the 4 minutes to 18"

Removing any function still gives me about the same (17").

In other words, the CLR function is practically invisible in terms of performance! :w00t:

In fact, I should have remembered because this is an experiment that Itzik Ben Gan had already demonstrated in his wonderful book "Inside SQL Server 2005 TSQL Querying"

Silly me...