Sams Teach Yourself SQL in 21 Days, Fourth Edition

Creating and Using Stored Procedures

The concept of stored procedures is an important one for the professional database programmer to master. Stored procedures are functions that contain potentially large groupings of SQL statements. These functions are called and executed just as a C, FORTRAN, or Visual Basic function is called. A stored procedure should encapsulate a logical set of commands that are often executed (such as a complex set of queries, updates, or inserts). Stored procedures enable the programmer to simply call the stored procedure as a function instead of repeatedly executing the statements inside the stored procedure. However, stored procedures have additional advantages.

Sybase, Inc. pioneered stored procedures with its SQL ...