Creating Nondeterministic functions in SQL Server using RAND()

Question

After a bit of searching and reading the documentation, it\'s clear that you can write user defined functions in SQL Server that are marked as either deterministic or nondet

Answer 1

Using a View might work for you.
From Returning Random Numbers from a select statement

CREATE VIEW vRandNumber
AS
SELECT RAND() as RandNumber

The view is necessary because, as you already found out, a UDF cannot use the rand() function because that would make the function non-determistic. You can trick the UDF to accept a random number by using a View.

CREATE FUNCTION RandNumber()
RETURNS float
AS
  BEGIN
  RETURN (SELECT RandNumber FROM vRandNumber)
  END

Finally, you can use this function in any SELECT to now return a random number between 0 and 1 per row:

SELECT dbo.RandNumber(), *
FROM Northwind..Customers