Stored Procedures and Triggers

A stored procedure is a group of Transact-SQL statements that is compiled one time, and then can be executed many times. This increases performance when the stored procedure is executed because the Transact-SQL statements do not have to be recompiled.

A trigger is a special type of stored procedure that is not called directly by a user. When the trigger is created, it is defined to fire when a specific type of data modification is made against a specific table or column.

A CREATE PROCEDURE or CREATE TRIGGER statement cannot span batches. This means that a stored procedure or trigger is always created in a single batch and compiled into an execution plan. The execution plan is created the first time the stored procedure or trigger is executed.