Brandie Tarvin (2/14/2008)
My apologies for the poorly worded question, but I'm still glad I posted it. I'm learning all sorts of things from this discussion. The primary thing being even Microsoft Press authors don't apparently get this stuff right. @=)
It's not your fault. The authors of the book in question decided to take a shortcut and came up with an oversimplified answer for an overly simple question. It seems like the question was written for SQL 2000 (or at least based on SQL 2000 functionality) since SQL 2005 shook up the landscape quite a bit with a lot more options in regards to user-defined functions. Of course determinism in UDFs was well-documented even in the days of SQL 2000, which is why it's even stranger the authors would completely overlook it.