Combine stored procedure and query in T-SQL

Question

What ways are there to combine executing of a stored procedure and using it's result or parameters in a regular SQL query? Or not supported yet but planned in future versions of SQL Server. I'm afraid that I use variables when it's possible do not.

I mean next:

-- passing result of SELECT to SP
SELECT a, b FROM t
EXEC my_sp a, b

-- passing result of SP to INSERT    
INSERT INTO t
EXEC my_sp a, b

etc.

Answer 1

no, you need to use a temp table

create table #results (col1 int, col2 varchar(5) ...)

INSERT INTO #results
   EXEC YourProcedure @parma...

then you can join to it

SELECT
    *
    FROM YourTable     y
        JOIN #results  r ON ...
    ....

if you don't know the columns and data types from the procedure you can use this excellent answer: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/653714/how-to-select-into-temp-table-from-stored-procedure/1228165#1228165

In brief it uses OPENROWSET to execute the stored procedure into a #temp table that is created on the fly, without the need to name and know the type all the columns.

Answer 2

If your SP can be rewritten as an inline table valued UDF, these typically perform very well and are equivalent to a parametrized view. ITVF can be used any place you would use a table or view.

If your SP won't work as an inline TVF (local variable manipulation required), it may work as a multi-statement TVF (contains a BEGIN/END) which may or may not perform poorly depending on what you have to do.

After your SP has been turned into a UDF, you can then still call the UDF from your SP (SELECT* FROM udf(params)) or elsewhere it can be used for joins, etc, so all your code is inside the UDF - no duplication.