Is it possible to create a stored procedure as
CREATE PROCEDURE Dummy
@ID INT NOT NULL
AS
BEGIN
END
Why is it not possible to do something like this?
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Answer
Parameter validation is not currently a feature of procedural logic in SQL Server, and NOT NULL is only one possible type of data validation. The CHAR datatype in a table has a length specification. Should that be implemented as well? And how do you handle exceptions? There is an extensive, highly developed and somewhat standards-based methodology for exception handling in table schemas; but not for procedural logic, probably because procedural logic is defined out of relational systems. On the other hand, stored procedures already have an existing mechanism for raising error events, tied into numerous APIs and languages. There is no such support for declarative data type constraints on parameters. The implications of adding it are extensive; especially since it’s well-supported, and extensible, to simply add the code:
IF ISNULL(@param) THEN
raise error ....
END IF
The concept of NULL in the context of a stored procedure isn’t even well-defined especially compared to the context of a table or an SQL expression. And it’s not Microsoft’s definition. The SQL standards groups have spent a lot of years generating a lot of literature establishing the behavior of NULL and the bounds of the definitions for that behavior. And stored procedures isn’t one of them.
A stored procedure is designed to be as light-weight as possible to make database performance as efficient as possible. The datatypes of parameters are there not for validation, but to enable the compiler to give the query optimizer better information for compiling the best possible query plan. A NOT NULL constraint on a parameter is headed down a whole nother path by making the compiler more complex for the new purpose of validating arguments. And hence less efficient and heavier.
There’s a reason stored procedures aren’t written as C# functions.