Part 3: T-SQL Implementation of NORMDIST / NORM.S.DIST

This is Part 3 of a set of posts. The other posts are:
Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Probability Density Function Implementation
Part 3: Cumulative Distribution Function Implementation 1
Part 4: Cumulative Distribution Function Implementation 2
Part 5: Cumulative Distribution Function Implementation 3
Part 6: References and Notes

Cumulative Distribution Function Implementation 1

The cumulative distribution function has no closed form expression and can only be approximated (see Part 1.)
The following implementation uses polynomial approximation 26.2.18 from Abramowitz & Stegun (1964) (see Part 6) for full references.

-- =============================================
-- Author:    Eli Algranti
-- Description:  Standard Normal Distribution 
--        Cummulative Distribution Function
--        using polinomial approximation 26.2.18 
--        from Abramowitz & Stegun (1964)
-- Copyright:  Eli Algranti (c) 2012
--
-- This code is licensed under the Microsoft Public 
-- License (Ms-Pl) (https://tsqlnormdist.codeplex.com/license)
-- =============================================
CREATE FUNCTION [dbo].[Stdnormaldistributioncdf_1] (@x FLOAT)
returns FLOAT
AS
  BEGIN
      DECLARE @Z FLOAT = Abs(@x)

      IF ( @Z >= 15 ) -- value is too large no need to compute
        BEGIN
            IF @x > 0
              RETURN 1;

            RETURN 0;
        END

      -- Compute the Standard Normal Cummulative Distribution using 
      -- polinomial approximation 26.2.18 from Abramowitz & Stegun (1964)
      DECLARE @c1 FLOAT = 0.196854;
      DECLARE @c2 FLOAT = 0.115194;
      DECLARE @c3 FLOAT = 0.000344;
      DECLARE @c4 FLOAT = 0.019527;
      -- For efficiency compute sequence of powers of @Z (instead of calling POWER(@Z,2), POWER(@Z,3), etc.)
      DECLARE @Z2 FLOAT = @Z * @Z;
      DECLARE @Z3 FLOAT = @Z2 * @Z;
      DECLARE @cd FLOAT = 1.0 - 0.5 * Power(1 + @c1 * @Z + @c2 * @Z2 + @c3 * @Z3
                                            +
                                            @c4 * @Z3 * @Z, -4)

      IF @x > 0
        RETURN @cd;

      RETURN 1.0 - @cd;
  END 

Verification Using Excel 2010 as Reference

Maximum difference 0.000232983371206426 at value -1.82000000000017

Verification Using Excel 2007 as Reference

Maximum difference 0.000232983371206363 at value -1.82000000000017

Discussion

This approximation provides a precision of three decimal places, which is enough for many applications.
The main advantage of this implementation is its simplicity, requiring just a handful of arithmetic operations.