Stored Procedures - Less parameters = More or less cost?

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Stored Procedures - Less parameters = More or less cost?

dj1202

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October 22, 2012 at 1:00 pm

#393439

Hello everyone, I am working on a report that is passing parameters to a stored procedure for its dataset. I was thinking of simplifying the stored procedure and removing some parameters. I would think that this would allow the report to run faster and more efficient since less parameters would have to be passed to the sp. However, I understand that this would pull more data from the data source, which gives me reason to believe that this may in fact result in less efficiency. Which would be correct in this case?

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Sean Lange SSC Guru Points: 286562 More actions · Answer 1

dj1202 (10/22/2012)
Hello everyone, I am working on a report that is passing parameters to a stored procedure for its dataset. I was thinking of simplifying the stored procedure and removing some parameters. I would think that this would allow the report to run faster and more efficient since less parameters would have to be passed to the sp. However, I understand that this would pull more data from the data source, which gives me reason to believe that this may in fact result in less efficiency. Which would be correct in this case?

With no more details than this I would say "it depends". In almost any real world situation you will suffer far worse performance issues by returning more data than needed instead of filtering the data prior to returning it to the client. Just the nature of passing a parameter is so negligible on performance I am not even sure you can measure the difference.

If performance of the query is at question, removing parameters is NOT the way to improved performance.

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haiao2000 Hall of Fame Points: 3734 More actions · Answer 2

it sounds like the exact oposite is true (again it depends) but take the examples below

method #1

create procedure SP1

@p1 int

,@p2 int

,@p3 int

,@p4 int

as

select * from SomeTable

where p1=@p1 and p2=@p2 and p3=@p3 and p4=@p4

--method #2

create procedure SP2

@p1

as

declare @p1 int,@p2 int,@p3 int,@p4 int;

set @p2= select p2 from sometable;

set @p3= select p2 from sometable;

set @p4= select p2 from sometable;