I'm totally for the use of stored procedures as a general rule. However, I can think of the odd argument for the use of inline sql. Sometimes it's easier as a developer to generate sql for particularly complex reports within a reporting application. For example if you have to get a large number of different values based on a large number of different parameters it may be more practical to generate inline sql than 1 or more monstrous procedures that take lots of arguments and maybe end up looking a bit procedural anyway. This might especially be the case if you only want to return a small amount of aggregated data based on complex requirements rather than return a large volume of data that you then aggregate in the reporting client.