>> While we're at it, what about temporary functions?
...
> Whether it's worth the trouble is another question. What's the
> use-case?
I have a data-loading script that transforms data from an intermediate
form in work tables to its final resting place in production. Part of this
is a major string processing step that's pushed into a stored procedure
temporarily to eliminate something on the order of a million round-trips
in trivial query overhead every night. (For each of ~320,000 records,
split a string into individual items and synchronize the detail table;
repeat for four sets of input data.)
I don't find lack of temporary functions to be a hindrance. Perhaps it's a
nice double-check for cleaning up when something goes wrong, but in that
case, I'm likely to want things left behind for debugging, but the
function creation is probably going to be rolled back anyhow.