Arvind Shyamsundar walks us through a scenario with user-defined functions with optional parameters:
If you notice carefully, the above query is an example of ‘optional parameters’ wherein the same query caters to situations where there are specific values for the parameters as well as other cases where there are none. Due to the implementation of the query (specifically the usage of ISNULL(@paramname, ColName)) what ends up happening is that the query plan thus generated will not leverage any indexes on the table. While this query can be refactored to separate versions for cases where the parameter values are supplied, and where they are not, another viable option is to use OPTION (RECOMPILE) on the statement level. This is an acceptable solution in most cases because the cost of scanning the table is often far higher than the cost of recompiling this query. So here is how we used OPTION RECOMPILE in this case:
Arvind walks us through three separate solutions. My fourth solution is, don’t use user-defined table-valued functions.