Creating and using stored procedures

A stored procedure in SQL Server is a precompiled collection of Transact-SQL statements, variables, and control-of-flow statements typically grouped together to perform a specific task. Stored procedures encapsulate code as a single module for processing. Statements in the procedure usually include DML statements, DDL statements, control-of-flow statements, comments, and calls to .NET Framework CLR methods. The code within a stored procedure is executed as a single unit or batch. The benefit of this is that the network traffic is greatly reduced as several Transact-SQL statements contained in the stored procedure are not required to travel through the network individually. Only the name of the stored procedure and its parameters are transmitted over the network.

The stored procedure runs faster than ad hoc Transact-SQL batches, especially when used in repetitive tasks. This is because SQL Server always caches a stored procedure execution plan in an area...