I don't think we currently use sp_executeSQL and I have used it only a few times. So I am not an expert with its use. We have many dynamic stored procedures in production that have more than 4,000 characters in the query built and some even exceed 8,000 characters. So being limited to 4,000 is not an option. I tried to use the same technique I showed in example 2 of my article but couldn't get it to work so it appears there is no way to extend the max beyond 4,000 characters, where as with the EXEC command I don't know of a limit to how many varchar(8000) variables you can add together at the time you execute the code and so your code is theoretically not limited.

The trade off is that you lose benefit of most if not all caching done by SQL Server. For us this hasn't been a problem since most of what we have in production completes within a few seconds of execution with or without caching. It will depend on your individual situation if you can accept this type of performance or not.

Robert W. Marda

SQL Programmer

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