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

In addition to what others have said about security, encapsulation, performance, etc. of stored procedures, I'd like to add that the usefulness of stored procedures increases with the richness of the stored procedure language.

I don't have much experience with MySQL, but as far as I know the stored procedure language is pretty limited.

T-SQL (in Microsoft SQL Server) is more capable, but has several shortcomings compared to full-featured programming languages. For example, it is not possible to declare a constant value in T-SQL, and until quite recently there was no exception handling, so error handling was a pain. There is no concept of a package, so all your code will be stand-alone procedures with no way to group them together except for a good naming convention. (Although it's true that you can write stored procedures in .NET languages.)

On the other hand, PL/SQL (in Oracle), is a full-featured programming language with complex data types, exception handling, packages for grouping procedures (with separate public and private sections), object types, and lots and lots of built-in packages that deal with everything from file access to compression and generating web pages. All that, plus seamless integration with the database and the SQL language. Entire applications can be built using PL/SQL, without "leaving the database", so to speak. Check out http://apex.oracle.com for an example of a massive (framework) application implemented in pure PL/SQL.