I must say that per principle I’m not a big fan of neither computed columns nor scalar UDFs. I mean, I find them attractive in the way they (appear to) make “things simpler” also allowing code reuse, improving queries readability, etc. Yes but they also hide or mask the complexity behind their use, which can often be quite deceiving, making it much harder to troubleshoot and solve performance problems. Furthermore they have several limitations by design that can hurt performance and all this combined, can sometimes make a “simple” query take many minutes or hours to run, instead of just a few seconds! When you see this situation happen again and again while fine tuning databases, their use becomes much less appealing.
Having this said, sometimes they can be useful of course but it’s very important to choose carefully where, how and when to use computed columns and scalar UDFs, so that performance won’t get hurt and its benefits outweigh the drawbacks.
Click through for an example of where the combo really falls short. I do like computed columns, though never with user-defined functions.