Posted by --CELKO-- on 07/31/07 14:00

>> No; it would much more likely mean that he wants to pass a set of values to his function. <<

Not very likely at all. Read the last 5+ years of postings here and
you will see that when they want to pass a list to an IN() predicate,
they explicitly ask about that. When they want to pass a table they
explicitly ask about that, as this guy did.

>> the ability to simply pass a set would make things enormously easier, faster, and cleaner - which is probably why they're including it in SQL 2008. <<

Right now you can declare a huge number of parameters in a stored
procedure -- more than enough for any practical situation. But
programmers who grew up with BASIC and other interpreted languages
seem to panic at the the thought of a long parameter list.

>> I can think of several scenarios in which doing exactly what he is
asking would be necessary - reporting being the most obvious. <<

The most obvious is a system utility program which treats all tables
as tables rather than as part of a logical model. Now you are at the
meta data level, which has no place in an application or RDBMS
schema.

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