Re: Why are stored procedures looked on so negatively?

Here's my $0.02

Stored procedures have a bunch of problems historically. Part of this is
because the interface traditionally is pretty spartan, and partly because
some people take them too far.

The first issue is that if you have a stored procedure which takes 2
arguments and you need to extend it to three, then you have to change every
call in the calling application. This can create a maintenance problem.
Variadic functions help somewhat but there are limits to what a variadic
function can do here. The programs and frameworks I write rely very
heavily on argument name and data type detection to rewrite calls
dynamically, but that has tradeoffs as well. In general though I think
that those tradeoffs are worth it and stored procedures are very, very
useful.

The second issue is simply, just because something can go in the database
doesn't mean it should. In general people start doing things like sending
email from the backend and this usually creates more problems than it
solves. The best approach is to see stored procedures as a way to
encapsulate the data behind a service-oriented API (like the NoSQL folks
advocate ;-) ). Hope this helps.

--
Best Wishes,
Chris Travers

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