What's the point of a stored procedure?

Question

Are they useful for anything outside of a database administrator? If I understand them correctly it\'s merely queries that can be saved directly into MySQL, so it\'d be useless

Answer 1

Stored Procedures can do far more than just query the database. They can contain any T-SQL statement. So you could use them to perform business logic, execute queries, do backups etc.

Many companies have a policy that all database activity is to be done via stored procedures. So, in now way would I say that a web development team would have no use for them. They might make great use of them.

On the other hand, in our company, we're not using them much of all for our next generation manufacturing applications. We're using an ORM (Linq-To-SQL) instead, and have very little use for stored procedures, at this point. I suspect though we'll still use them somewhat, in order to avoid several trips back and forth to the server. Somethings are just more efficient if done in a stored procedure, if you're already doing work on the server anyway.