Robert Sheldon continues a series on MySQL:
In the previous three articles in this series, I focused on creating basic database objects that you can use to get started with MySQL. You learned how to build an initial database and then add tables, views, and stored procedures. In this article, I cover one more important type of object, the stored function, a routine that is stored in a database and can be invoked on-demand, similar to a user-defined scalar function in SQL Server or other database systems.
I’m not familiar enough with stored functions to know if they have the same performance limitations as what we have in SQL Server (specifically around needing to run everything in the function once for each row) but based on a comment at the end of Robert’s post, it does seem that way.