4. And the SQL statements.
Even though there are numerous other options available while we define a stored procedure, I kept it simple, just to give you a basic idea about creating stored procedures.
Advantages!
Almost every database Guru that you will meet, will suggest using stored procedures. For you, it will seem as if most of them blindly believes in stored procedures. But there are reasons for this. This is what I am trying to explore in this article.
1. Performance
All the SQL statements, that you send to your database server passes through a series of actions, called execution. These are the steps that your SQL statement passes through before the data is returned to the client.
User sends request to execute the Stored Procedure. SQL Server checks for syntax errors. Identifies and checks the aliases in the FROM clause. Creates a query plan. Compiles the query and. Executes the query plan and return the requested data.
See, lots of things are happening inside that we didn’t knew about. Now, the crucial question. Does a stored procedure bypass all these?
In a way, yes. The previous versions of SQL Server stored the compiled execution plan in system tables, making them partially pre-compiled. This improved performance, because the Server did not have to compile the stored procedure each and every time it is called.
In later versions of SQL Server, there were a large number of changes in statement processing. Now, the stored procedure is stored in a procedure cache when it is called, making subsequent calls faster.
2. Security
Stored procedures provide significant benefits when it comes to security. By using a stored procedure, you can grant permissions to certain users to access data, reducing the immense coding that you need to do in your client applications. This is one of the best ways to control access to your data.
3. Modifications/Maintenance
If you use stored procedures for database access, any change in the database can be reflected on to the client application without much effort. This is because you know exactly where the data is accessed from, and you also know exactly where you need to alter. This means no scuba diving in to thousands of lines of source code to identify areas where you need to alter and no headache of re-deploying the client application.
4. Minimal processing at the client.
When creating a client/server application, normally it was the client who took care of the integrity of data that went in to the database. Managing Primary Keys, Foreign keys, cascaded deletion everything was done by the client, and the database server just had to store data given by the client.
Well friends, things have changed. Stored procedures help you write batch of SQL statements, which helps you manage the transactions, constraints etc. A little data aware code has to be written in to the client application, making it a thin-client application. These applications will be concerned more about displaying data in the way the user needs them and they know little about the database.
Take another scenario. You have a database with millions of rows and hundreds of tables. You need to do some calculations before updating each and every record. If you are fetching the complete data to the client, and is asking the client machine to process the data completely, then think about the overhead it creates. But when the client can execute a store procedure, where you have done the calculations prior to updating the records, you have a client, that doesn’t need to know about the calculations. This also reduces the amount of computing happening in the client, and the server takes care of tedious calculations.
5. Network traffic
Client applications always have to request/send data from the database server. These data are sent as packets, and travel through the network to the server.
To explain how stored procedures can help reduce network traffic, let us see another scenario, where a request for data is send from the client. The request is sent as an SQL statement, and here it is.
SELECT dbo.Tbl_Tablename.fieldID,
dbo.Tbl_Tablename.fieldName,
dbo.Tbl_Tablename.Title,
dbo.TBl_otherTableName.fieldID,
dbo.Tbl_Tablename.Published,
dbo.Tbl_Tablename.Updated,
dbo.Tbl_Tablename.SomeText,
dbo.Tbl_Tablename.TransactionDate,
dbo.Tbl_Tablename.Approved,
dbo.Tbl_Tablename.ApprovedBy,
dbo.Tbl_Tablename.ApprovalID
FROM
dbo.Tbl_Tablename
LEFT OUTER JOIN
dbo.TBl_otherTableName on dbo.Tbl_Tablename.fieldID=dbo.TBl_otherTableName.ID
Where
DateDiff ( wk, dbo.Tbl_Tablename.TransactionDate, getdate()) <= 1
and dbo.Tbl_Tablename.Approved = 0
518 Characters travel through the network, and when there are 20 client applications using this stored procedure 20 times a day, the number of characters passing through the network for just this request will be 2,07,200!
You see the difference now. If it was a stored procedure, lets call it SP_fetchSomething, there are only 6800 characters in the network for the request. A saving of 2,004,00!
As you have seen the five major points that I use to explain why I used a stored procedure, I hope you will also elect to intelligently use this awesome technology in your next database design.
