Question

I am working on a web project where I have to retrieve (let’s say) employee records. In some cases I have to retrieve a single record by providing an EmployeeID. In other cases, I have to retrieve multiple employee records by providing a SectorID. This logic could be expanded to cover additional scenarios: get all employee records, get employee records by qualification, etc.

Is it good practice to use one single stored procedure that accepts a variable number of parameters to handle different scenarios (using default values when the parameter is not provided). Ex:

CREATE PROCEDURE [dbo].[GetEmployeeRecords]
(
    @employeeID int = -1,
    @sectorID int = -1
)

AS

BEGIN

    SELECT  EmployeeID,
            EmployeeFirstName,
            EmployeeLastName,
            s.SectorName

    FROM dbo.Employees e

    INNER JOIN Sectors s ON e.SectorID = s.SectorID

    WHERE (e.EmployeeID = @EmployeeID OR @EmployeeID = -1)

    AND (e.SectorID = @SectorID OR @SectorID = -1)

Answer 1

here is a very comprehensive article on this topic:

Dynamic Search Conditions in T-SQL by Erland Sommarskog

it covers all the issues and methods of trying to write queries with multiple optional search conditions

here is the table of contents:

   Introduction
      The Case Study: Searching Orders
      The Northgale Database
   Dynamic SQL
      Introduction
      Using sp_executesql
      Using the CLR
      Using EXEC()
      When Caching Is Not Really What You Want
   Static SQL
      Introduction
      x = @x OR @x IS NULL
      Using IF statements
      Umachandar's Bag of Tricks
      Using Temp Tables
      x = @x AND @x IS NOT NULL
      Handling Complex Conditions
   Hybrid Solutions – Using both Static and Dynamic SQL
      Using Views
      Using Inline Table Functions
   Conclusion
   Feedback and Acknowledgements
   Revision History