Why Stored Programs?

Why should you use stored programs? Great question, here’s my little insight into a situation that I heard about in a large organization.

A very large organization is having a technology argument. In someway, like politics, half-truth drives this type of discussion. This company has hundreds of databases and they’re about half SQL Server and Oracle. The argument (half-truth) states that using T-SQL or PL/SQL yields “spaghetti” code!

It seems like an old argument from my perspective. After all, I’ve been working with T-SQL and PL/SQL for a long time. Let’s examine the merit of the argument against stored programs.

First of all, the argument against stored programs is simply not true. SQL DML statements, like the INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE statements should maintain ACID compliant interactions with a single table in a database. Unfortunately, the same statements create anomalies (errors) in a poorly designed database.