>I use scatter and gather alot but I want this udf to return 3 specific values, not the field list. I am trying to keep my middle tier business objects as lean and mean as possilble.

Based purely on that description a function with 3 parameters called by reference will do the trick, since it definitely is the fastest way to communicate between two layers and to get at the values. If your code passes those parameters through a lot of methods/functions without acessing their values, a parameter object will at a certain time become the faster approach.

From your description it sounds as if you have lots of traffic between the layers, which in itself can lead to bad perf. The object approach is "cleaner" but you might look at how your app is structured works before deciding.

my 0.02 EUR

thomas