Well,

View's

Advantage - Can be indexed. Can denormalize data to simplify your client side multi-join queries. Can use for ROW level security without worrying about it at your client.

Disadvantage - Hard to update to. You may need to use INSTEAD OF triggers.

SP's

Save as views, except can't be indexed.

Advantage - You can pass parameters and this will affect what the SP returns. Also, the SP can return output variables in addition to result sets.

Functions -

I would limit functions to doing a specific thing, but not to replace SP's. For example, say you allow for custom fields and store them as XML in a text field in your table. You could have a function that extracts the specified value. You can use this funtion in a query, view or SP.

Calculated fields -

Don't forget these, they can be helpfull in many places.

As far as what is 'fastest' do you mean, dev time, performance? I think as long as you underliying queries are optimized and your data is properly designed and indexed properly they will all give good performance.

BOb


>Hi,
>
>SQL2K
>
>I have been using stored procedures to return result sets to VFP Front end cursors. It works very well. But - since I'm always looking for a better or faster way to do things, I want to consider using either SQL Server Views (NOT VFP Remote Views!) or possibly UDF() to return my result sets to my cursors - which may as simple as "select * from table", or as complex as 10-12 level inner/left joins using dynamic SQL and passed in where clauses.
>
>Any comments as to advantage (if any) of SQL views or UDF or stored procs?
>
>TIA,