The Structure of Stored Procedures

The Structure of Stored Procedures
(from SQL SERVER 2000 Stored Procedure Programming)

We will pause aminute to explain the structure of a stored procedure.
A stored procedure encapsulates a relatively simple Select statement for later use.
It returns a recordset containing values from the Selected column.

The recordset will contain only records that matched with the WHERE statement.

The code of a stored procedure consists of a header and a body.

The header of the stored procedure defines external attributes of the stored procedure—its name and a list of one or more parameters.

A example stored procedure has two parameters.
Parameter names must start with the @ character.
The developer must also define a datatype for each parameter.
The header must begin with the Create Procedure keyword and finish with the As keyword.

The body of the stored procedure contains the Transact-SQL statements to be executed when the stored procedure runs.

In this example, there is just one Select statement using the procedure parameters.