Adam Machanic wrote an excellent article about this about eight years ago. To SP or not to SP in SQL Server: an argument for stored procedures, The database-as-API approach I don't really have much to add to this excellent article other than that if you are making a decision about using stored procedures on SQL Server versus not using stored procedures, don't do it based on "performance" - there is no difference on modern servers. Do it because you want a securable, testable, maintainable API to your database. Your application may not need that. If you don't need it, then you don't need to use stored procedures.