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copied!<p>I've had some very bad experiences with this.</p> <p>I'm not opposed to stored procedures in their place, but gratuitous use of stored procedures can be very expensive.</p> <p>First, stored procedures run on the database server. That means that if you have a multi-server environment with 50 webservers and one database server, instead of spreading workloads over 50 cheap machines, you load up one expensive one (since the database server is commonly built as a heavyweight server). And you're risking creating a single-point-of-failure.</p> <p>Secondly, it's not very easy to write an application solely in stored procedures, although I ran into one that made a superhuman effort to try to. So you end up with something that's expensive to maintain: It's implemented in 2 different programming languages, and the source code is often not all in one place either, since stored procedures are definitively stored in the DBMS and not in a source archive. Assuming that someone ever managed/bothered o pull them out of the database server and source-archive them at all.</p> <p>So aside from a fairly messy app architecture, you also limit the set of qualified chimpanzees who can maintain it, as multiple skills are required.</p> <p>On the other hand, stored procedures are extremely useful, IF:</p> <ol> <li><p>You need to maintain some sort of data integrity across multiple systems. That is, the stored logic doesn't belong to any single app, but you need consistent behavior from all participating apps. A certain amount of this is almost inevitable in modern-day apps in the form of foreign keys and triggers, but occasionally, major editing and validation may be warranted as well.</p></li> <li><p>You need performance that can only be achieved by running logic on the database server itself and not as a client. But, as I said, when you do that, you're eating into the total system resources of the DBMS server. So it behooves you to ensure that if there are significant bits of the offending operation that CAN be offloaded onto clients, you can separate them out and leave the most critical stuff for the DBMS server.</p></li> </ol>

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