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Asked: 2026-05-11T04:01:48+00:00

I’ve just started my first development job for a reasonably sized company that has

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I’ve just started my first development job for a reasonably sized company that has to manage a lot of data. An average database is 6gb (from what I’ve seen so far). One of the jobs is reporting. How it’s done currently is –

Data is replicated and transferred onto a data warehouse. From there, all the data required for a particular report is gathered (thousands of rows and lots of tables) and aggregated to a reports database in the warehouse. This is all done with stored procedures.

When a report is requested, a stored procedure is invoked which copies the data onto a reports database which PHP reads from to display the data.

I’m not a big fan of stored procs at all. But the people I’ve spoken to insist that stored procedures are the only option, as queries directly against the data via a programming language are incredibly slow (think 30 mins?). Security is also a concern.

So my question is – are stored procedures required when you have a very large data set? Do queries really take that long on such a large amount of data or is there a problem with either the DB servers or how the data is arranged (and indexed?). I’ve got a feeling that something is wrong.

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  1. The reasoning behind using a stored procedure is that the execution plan that is created in order to execute your procedure is cached by SQL Server in an area of memory known as the Plan Cache. When the procedure is then subsequently re-run at a later time, the execution plan has the possibility of being re-used.

    A stored procedure will not run any faster than the same query, executed as a batch of T-SQL. It is the execution plans re-use that result in a performance improvement. The query cost will be the same for the actual T-SQL.

    Offloading data to a reporting database is a typical pursuit however you may need to review your indexing strategy on the reporting database as it will likely need to be quite different from that of your OLTP platform for example.

    You may also wish to consider using SQL Server Analysis Services in order to service your reporting requirements as it sounds like your reports contain lots of data aggregations. Storing and processing data for the purpose of fast counts and analytics is exactly what SSAS is all about. It sounds like it is time for your business to look as building a data warehouse.

    I hope this helps but please feel free to request further details.

    Cheers, John

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