Stored Procedures - End of days

Question

I’m listening to the Hanselminutes Podcast; "StackOverflow uses ASP.NET MVC - Jeff Atwood and his technical team". During the course of the Podcast they are speaking about SQL server and say something along the lines of 'The days of the Stored Procedure are over'.

Now I'm not a DBA but this has taken me a bit by surprise. I always assumed that SPs were the way to go for speed (as they are complied) and security not to mention scalability and maintainability. If this is not the case and SPs are on their last legs, what will replace them or what should we be doing in the future?

Answer 1

maybe i'm too old-school, or too lazy, or both, but i have to disagree. Time and again stored procedures have 'saved the day' because when a minor back-end change or bug appears we only have to fix the stored procedure instead of updating the desktop application on several dozen desktops plus the web server. In addition, the users are not interrupted. This saves a great deal of effort and user hassle.

In addition, some DB operations are just going to be more efficient on the server rather than going back-and-forth across the network, esp. when one stored procedure calls another which calls another etc. (with or without cursors)

EDIT: in a SOA architecture the update-the-client-apps issue is mitigated (thanks maud-dib), but stored procedures calling each other is still more efficient than multiple network round-trips to the SOA layer. And updating the SOA layer is not always trivial either.