Deterministic Property

All expressions and functions are deterministic or nondeterministic, which means they may or may not return the same results each time they are evaluated.

An expression’s deterministic property defines a computed column or a function-based index key, and thus defines the computed column or function-based index key itself.

The deterministic property depends on whether the expression contains any nondeterministic elements, such as various system functions, user-defined functions, and global variables.

Whether a function is deterministic or nondeterministic depends on the function coding: