So, are Database Stored Procedures Good or Bad?

11 July 2007 in Databases & Personal Experience

I was doing some researching on Stored Procedures performance, and found this article on O’Reilly Databases.

Roland Bouman analyses survey data based on performance, portability and appropriateness of using Stored Procedures.

Its well known that this subject is “tricky”, mainly because his data shows most developers think Stored procedures are faster than client-side code (and SQL statements). Although the article is not focused in any database implementation, it really tries to “solve” some myths around the subject. I also agree with the author, using Stored procedures is good in some cases, and bad in others.

4 comments. Add your own comment.

Vitor says 11 July 2007 @ 22:47

Bummer… I followed the link to see the arguments use to support the sentence “using Stored procedures is good in some cases, and bad in others”, but neither you nor the author decided to expand on them :-(

admin says 11 July 2007 @ 22:52

Yes, that’s true. Unfortunately, he seems to have forgotten to write that article.

Stored Procedures? at Joel’s Corner says 11 July 2007 @ 23:47

[…] Fabio’s post on “are Database Stored Procedures Good or Bad?“, i’ll give a couple of […]

Roland Bouman says 13 July 2007 @ 07:43

Hi Vitor, Fabio;

The “good or bad” thing was of course to provoke response. As for arguments when good, when bad - well it depends but that does not mean you can’t say nothing sensible about it ;)

- portability:
good if you want application code portability
bad if you want database portability
- performance:
good if you can execute data intensive operations to the database server because it saves a network hop
bad for intensive calculation - it just occupies the database server (you will need an upgrade sooner) and prevents you from scaling the application as usage grows.

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