Question

What kind of things would you not store in stored procedures?

Answer 1

This isn’t a question about whether to use stored procedures. It’s a hypothetical interview question. The interviewer wants to be confident that you understand SPs aren’t a dumping ground for code and data that are better suited elsewhere in the system.

A reasonable answer might include the following:

• Data such as constants or client-specific logic never belong in SPs.
• Passwords or other security tokens never belong in SPs or any code.
• Complex processing may not be suited for today’s rather primitive SP languages.
• Business logic may be better suited for the middle-tier rather than in SPs, due to differences in the expressive nature of the languages, maintainability, OO design, or other factors.
• Presentation layer code is probably best suited for the UI, not SPs.

With interview questions such as this one, the goal is not to determine the one true correct or incorrect response. Instead, the interviewer has his ideal response in mind, and your job is to identify that response. If your interviewer is a DBA, manages a DBA group, or appears to align his or herself strongly with a DB-focused methodology, then you may wish to play down the weakness of SP languages, and skip the recommendation to avoid complicated business logic in the database. There is a time and place for those debates, but not during your interview!