brotherhood_of_LAN - 12:31 am on Oct 11, 2012 (gmt 0)

You're welcome.

Use of procedures is encouraged as it means less traffic between the client and the database, mainly that the CALL function is a lot more compact than sending queries that could end up being kilobytes in size. They're also quite strict about the variables you pass in and out of them so there's less scope for errors.

I've been using them more of late as they're useful for separating a lot of SQL out of your scripting language.