SQL-Server Performance: What is faster, a stored procedure or a view?

Question

What is faster in SQL Server 2005/2008, a Stored Procedure or a View?

EDIT: As many of you pointed out, I am being too vague. Let me attempt to

Answer 1

I prefer stored procedures due to Allow greater control over data, if you want to build a good, secure modular system then use stored procedures, it can run multiple sql-commands, has control-of-flow statements and accepts parameters. Everything you can do in a view you can do in a stored procedure. But in a stored procedure, you can do with much more flexibility.

Answer 2

I know I'm not supposed to turn this into a "discussion", but I'm very interested in this and just thought I'd share my empirical observations of a specific situation, with particular reference to all the comments above which state that an equivalent SELECT statement executed from within a Stored Procedure and a View should have broadly the same performance.

I have a view in database "A" which joins 5 tables in a separate database (db "B"). If I attach to db "A" in SSMS and SELECT * from the view, it takes >3 minutes to return 250000 rows. If I take the select statement from the design page of the view and execute it directly in SSMS, it takes < 25 seconds. Putting the same select statement into a stored procedure gives the same performance when I execute that procedure.

Without making any observations on the absolute performance (db "B" is an AX database which we are not allowed to touch!), I am still absolutely convinced that in this case using an SP is an order of magnitude faster than using a View to retrieve the same data, and this applies to many other similar views in this particular case.

I don't think it's anything to do with creating a connection to the other db, unless by using a view it somehow can never cache the connection whereas the select does, because I can switch between the 2 selects in the same SSMS window repeatedly and the performance of each query remains consistent. Also, if I connect directly to db "B" and run the select without the dbname.dbo.... refs, it takes the same time.

Any thoughts anyone?

Answer 3

Stored Procedures (SPs) and SQL Views are different "beasts" as stated several times in this post.

If we exclude some [typically minor, except for fringe cases] performance considerations associated with the caching of the query plan, the time associated with binding to a Stored Procedure and such, the two approaches are on the whole equivalent, performance-wise. However...

A view is limited to whatever can be expressed in a single SELECT statement (well, possibly with CTEs and a few other tricks), but in general, a view is tied to declarative forms of queries. A stored procedure on the other can use various procedural type constructs (as well as declarative ones), and as a result, using SPs, one can hand-craft a way of solving a given query which may be more efficient than what SQL-Server's query optimizer may have done (on the basis of a single declarative query). In these cases, an SPs may be much faster (but beware... the optimizer is quite smart, and it doesn't take much to make an SP much slower than the equivalent view.)

Aside from these performance considerations, the SPs are more versatile and allow a broader range of inquiries and actions than the views.

Answer 4

A couple other considerations: While performance between an SP and a view are essentially the same (given they are performing the exact same select), the SP gives you more flexibility for that same query.

• The SP will support ordering the result set; i.e., including an ORDER BY statement. You cannot do so in a view.
• The SP is fully compiled and requires only an exec to invoke it. The view still requires a SELECT * FROM view to invoke it; i.e., a select on the compiled select in the view.

Answer 5

I believe that another way of thinking would be to use stored procedures to select the views. This will make your architecture a loosely coupled system. If you decide to change the schema in the future, you won't have to worry 'so' much that it will break the front end.

I guess what I'm saying is instead of sp vs views, think sp and views :)

Answer 6

Stored procedures and views are different and have different purposes. I look at views as canned queries. I look at stored procedures as code modules.

For example let's say you have a table called tblEmployees with these two columns (among others): DateOfBirth and MaleFemale.

A view called viewEmployeesMale which filters out only male employees can be very useful. A view called viewEmployeesFemale is also very useful. Both of these views are self describing and very intuitive.

Now, lets say you need to produce a list all male employees between the ages of 25 and 30. I would tend to create a stored procedure to produce this result. While it most certainly could be built as a view, in my opinion a stored procedure is better suited for dealing with this. Date manipulation especially where nulls are a factor can become very tricky.