As others already said, it depends. I used to work for a company where we were accessing the same database through three different programming languages: PHP, Java and C++. As these were all different programmers/teams they were not all on the same proficiency level writing SQL and performance of the database was a huge issue. So we decided to switch over to SPs, properly documented and versioned in CVS as a sort of common interface for all three teams to access the data.