Tom Zika takes away the scalars:
I’m still surprised many people don’t realise how lousy Scalar functions are. So because it’s my current focus in work and this Stack Overflow question, I’ll be revisiting this topic.
The focus of part one is parallelism. Unfortunately, parallelism often gets a bad rep because of the prominent wait stats. Also, if there is a skew, it can run slow. But for the most part, it’s advantageous.
Whether or not you want parallelism should be an informed choice. But Scalar functions will enforce the query to run serially, even if you are unaware. That’s why I want to shine a light on this.
Read on for a demo of how even a no-op scalar function can affect query performance. Given the mess we normally see in scalar functions, it’s all downhill from there.