What's the point of a stored procedure?

Question

Are they useful for anything outside of a database administrator? If I understand them correctly it\'s merely queries that can be saved directly into MySQL, so it\'d be useless

Answer 1

In addition to all the answers given here, i would also like to point out that stored procedures are a way to save the execution plan of a query.

you may have a set of SQL statements you just call from your application, but each time you execute the query SQL server has no way of knowing that the query you just invoked is the exact same query that as the one you called a few minutes ago (which would happen very frequently in a web application). So SQL server has to repeat the all the processing again (build the query plan and execute it).

Now if the same query had been encapsulated within a stored procedure, SQL server would have saved the execution plan for that stored procedure so that each time you call the sproc, it doesn't have to recompile the execution plan all the time. (It may even cache the data based on the parameters passed to the sproc, but i dont know exactly how this works)