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A subroutine stored in a database and executedby the database management system. The subroutine may bewritten in the same language in which the database is queriedand may be precompiled to improve performance.Typically a stored procedure encapsulates some businessprocess. Performing this on the database server avoids thenetwork overhead of transferring input data to the client forprocessing. This would be particularly significant ifprocessing lots of data and returning a small result set likea total or maximum. Stored procedures also provide consistentimplementation of the business logic to clients written indifferent languages and running in different environments.Some financial systems allow databases access through storedprocedures alone, this restricts actions on the data to asmall number of auditable queries.Sybase SQL Server (Adaptive Server Enterprise) was the firstcommercially successful RDBMS to support stored procedures.