Beginning Microsoft SQL Server 2008 ... - S3 Tech Training

Chapter 12: Stored Procedures
Creating the Sproc: Basic Syntax
Creating a sproc works pretty much the same as creating any other object in a database, except that it
uses the AS keyword that you first saw when we took a look at views. The basic syntax looks like this:
CREATE PROCEDURE|PROC
[ [schema.] [VARYING] [= ] [OUT [PUT]]
[READONLY]
[, [schema.] [VARYING] [= ] [OUT[PUT]]
[READONLY]
[, ...
...
]]
[WITH
RECOMPILE| ENCRYPTION | [EXECUTE AS { CALLER|SELF|OWNER|}]
[FOR REPLICATION]
AS
| EXTERNAL NAME ..
As you can see, we still have our basic CREATE syntax that is the
backbone of every CREATE statement. The only oddity here is the choice between PROCEDURE and PROC.
Either option works just fine, but as always, I recommend that you be consistent regarding which one
you choose (personally, I like the saved keystrokes of PROC). The name of your sproc must follow the
rules for naming as outlined in Chapter 1.
After the name comes a list of parameters. Parameterization is optional, and we’ll defer that discussion
until a little later in the chapter.
Last, but not least, comes your actual code following the AS keyword.
An Example of a Basic Sproc
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Perhaps the best example of basic sproc syntax is to get down to the most basic of sprocs — a sproc that
returns all the columns in all the rows on a table — in short, everything to do with a table’s data.
I would hope that by now you have the query that would return all the contents of a table down cold
(Hint: SELECT * FROM...). If not, then I would suggest a return to the chapter on basic query syntax. In
order to create a sproc that performs this basic query — we’ll do this one against the Employee table (in
the HumanResources schema) — we just add the query in the code area of the sproc syntax:
USE AdventureWorks2008
GO
CREATE PROC spEmployee
AS
SELECT * FROM HumanResources.Employee;
Not too rough, eh? If you’re wondering why I put the GO keyword in before the CREATE syntax (if we
were just running a simple SELECT statement, we wouldn’t need it), it’s because most non-table CREATE
statements cannot share a batch with any other code. Indeed, even with a CREATE TABLE statement, leaving
out the GO can become rather dicey. In this case, having the USE command together with our CREATE
PROC statement would have been a no-no and would have generated an error.