This editorial highlights a key reason why I believe in using stored procedures. All I want from a stored procedure is to answer some question (no, not query) or to store a set of data (no, not a data set). I don't care how these happen and that gives power to those either side of the stored procedure interface definition. Anything can change on either side as long as the contract remains unbroken.

As a systems developer that often has a RDBMS at the back end, I want to give as much leeway to DBAs to do performance tuning as well as allowing for multiple system access to a single database.