A stored procedure is a collection of SQL statements that allows you to perform a task repeatedly. You can create the procedure once and reuse it any number of times in your program. This can improve the maintainability of your application and allow applications to access the database in a uniform and optimized manner. The goals of this chapter are to get you acquainted with stored procedures by creating and modifying them in SQL Server 2012 and to explain how C# programs can interact with them. This chapter covers the following: Creating stored procedures Modifying stored procedures Displaying the definitions of stored procedures Renaming stored procedures Working with stored procedures in C# Deleting stored procedures