When Should You use Stored Procedures?
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If your server defines stored procedures, you should use them if they apply to the needs of your application. A database server developer creates stored procedures to handle frequently-repeated database-related tasks. Often, operations that act upon large numbers of rows in database tables—or that use aggregate or mathematical functions—are candidates for stored procedures. If stored procedures exist on the remote database server your application uses, you should take advantage of them in your application. Chances are you need some of the functionality they provide, and you stand to improve the performance of your database application by:
- Taking advantage of the server’s usually greater processing power and speed.
- Reducing the amount of network traffic since the processing takes place on the server where the data resides.
For example, consider an application that needs to compute a single value: the standard deviation of values over a large number of records. To perform this function in your application, all the values used in the computation must be fetched from the server, resulting in increased network traffic. Then your application must perform the computation. Because all you want in your application is the end result—a single value representing the standard deviation—it would be far more efficient for a stored procedure on the server to read the data stored there, perform the calculation, and pass your application the single value it requires.
See “Working with Stored Procedures” in the Data Definition Guide for more information.