Microsoft’s SQL Server may be a big dog in the enterprise database market, but its conspicuous lack of user-defined functions (UDFs) has stacked up poorly against other leaders of that pack ...

In SQL Server 2014 we saw the introduction of Natively Compiled Stored Procedures. In 2016 we’ll be able to do the same for Scalar User Defined Functions.

In addition, developers are able to define SQL Server user-defined types, stored procedures and functions using Common Language Runtime (CLR) languages.