How to return the output of stored procedure into a variable in sql server

Question

I want to execute a stored procedure in SQL Server and assign the output to a variable (it returns a single value) ?

Answer 1

That depends on the nature of the information you want to return.

If it is a single integer value, you can use the return statement

 create proc myproc
 as 
 begin
     return 1
 end
 go
 declare @i int
 exec @i = myproc

If you have a non integer value, or a number of scalar values, you can use output parameters

create proc myproc
  @a int output,
  @b varchar(50) output
as
begin
  select @a = 1, @b='hello'
end
go
declare @i int, @j varchar(50)
exec myproc @i output, @j output

If you want to return a dataset, you can use insert exec

create proc myproc
as 
begin
     select name from sysobjects
end
go

declare @t table (name varchar(100))
insert @t (name)
exec myproc

You can even return a cursor but that's just horrid so I shan't give an example :)