Steve, John, Philip, thanks a lot for your help!

I'll now try to verify some of the assumptions I made about how things are to be done best with sql server...

I figured how to do an execution plan in text:

|--Nested Loops(Inner Join, WHERE: (like([t].[Topic], '%'+[f].[keyword]+'%', NULL)))

. |--Table Scan(OBJECT: (@kw AS [f]))

. |--Filter(WHERE: (STARTUP EXPR(Convert([@search])=1)))

. . |--Clustered Index Scan(OBJECT: ([shp].[dbo].[tblTopic].[PK_tblTopic] AS...

Thanks, Steve, but:

Because this query is only a (simplified) part of a bigger problem used as an example to illustrate my question in this forum which is:

How can I...

By default I can't: Access is denied. This is because I do not have administrative privileges with my regular user account. I could use "runas", but then I'd have to...

Though not adding columns "all over the place", sometimes there has a column to be added, a view to be altered, a stored procedure to be fine-tuned. In a large...

I guess then there is nothing to do about that.

It would have been nice to be able to use the "SELECT *" statement in the function, for the simple reason...

That's what I thought, too, but unfortunately it doesn't. Here is my test case, I tried to make it as simple as possible:

CREATE TABLE [dbo].[_tblFunc] (

[idfunc] [int] IDENTITY (1, 1)...

yes, I did update the view with "EXEC sp_refreshview v_func". And it works, because when I do a simple "SELECT * FROM v_func", all columns are displayed correctly.