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SQL Server - Use Table Valued parameters to construct an IN statement

A colleague created a stored procedure that returns some data from a specific table. Nothing special would you think and you are right. The only reason we were using a stored procedure here is that we had a very specific requirement that every attempt to read data from this specific table should be logged.

Here is a simplified version of the stored procedure he created:

What I want to talk about in this post is the usage of a (comma separated) string parameter that is used to construct the filter criteria for the query.

Remark: This version of the stored procedure is already better than the original version that was using dynamic SQL to construct an IN clause:

Using Table-Valued Parameters

We can further improve the procedure above by using a table valued parameter.

To use table-valued parameters instead of comma-separated strings in your stored procedure, you can follow these steps:

Step 1: Create a Table-Valued Parameter Type

First, you need to create a table-valued parameter type. This type will represent the structure of the values you want to pass to your stored procedure.

Step 2: Modify the Stored Procedure

Now we can modify our stored procedure to accept the new table-valued parameter type:

Step 3: Call the Stored Procedure with our Table-Valued Parameter

When calling the stored procedure, you'll need to declare a variable of the table type and populate it with your values:

Key advantages

Using this approach offers some advantages:

  • Performance: Table-valued parameters are generally more efficient than using comma-separated strings, especially for larger datasets.
  • Allows using strongly typed parameters: We don’t have to cast the parameter values to the correct datatype.
  • Supports larger data sets: The size of the string parameter is limited. By using table value parameters we can support larger parameter sets.

More information

Use table-valued parameters (Database Engine) - SQL Server | Microsoft Learn

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