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

Now that we have our sproc created, let’s execute it to see what we get:
EXEC spEmployee;
We get exactly what we would have gotten if we had run the SELECT statement that’s embedded in the sproc:
BusinessEntityID NationalIDNumber LoginID
---------------- -----------------------------------------------------------------
1 295847284 adventure-works\ken0 ---
2 245797967 adventure-works\terri0 ---
3 509647174 adventure-works\roberto0 ---
…
288 954276278 adventure-works\rachel0 ---
289 668991357 adventure-works\jae0 ---
290 134219713 adventure-works\ranjit0 ---
(290 row(s) affected)
Note that I’ve trimmed several columns from the right-hand side of the result set (we can only fit so much in
the width of a book!) — you’ll get additional columns for things like JobTitle, BirthDate, and so on).
You’ve just written your first sproc. It was easy, of course, and frankly, for most situations, sproc writing
isn’t nearly as difficult as most database people would like to have you think (job preservation), but
there are lots of possibilities, and we’ve only seen the beginning.
Changing Stored Procedures with AL TER
I’m going to admit something here — I cut and pasted almost all the text you’re about to read in this and
the next section (“Dropping Sprocs”) from the chapter on views. What I’m pointing out by telling you
this is that they work almost identically from the standpoint of what an ALTER statement does.
The main thing to remember when you edit sprocs with T-SQL is that you are completely replacing the
existing sproc. The only differences between using the ALTER PROC statement and the CREATE PROC
statement are:
❑ ALTER PROC expects to find an existing sproc, where CREATE doesn’t.
❑ ALTER PROC retains any permissions (also often referred to as rights) that have been established
for the sproc. It keeps the same object ID within system objects and allows the dependencies to
be kept. For example, if procedure A calls procedure B and you drop and recreate procedure B,
you no longer see the dependency between the two. If you use ALTER, it is all still there.
❑ ALTER PROC retains any dependency information on other objects that may call the sproc being
altered.
The latter of these three is the biggie.
Chapter 12: Stored Procedures
If you perform a DROP and then use a CREATE, you have almost the same effect as
using an ALTER PROC statement with one rather big difference — if you DROP and
CREATE, then you will need to entirely reestablish your permissions on who can and
can’t use the sproc.
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