>>It reminds me -- and this is not a warm memory -- of COBOL.
When PC's and DBase made their debut during the mid-1980's Bob Davies, the legendary founder of SBT Accounting Systems, liked to demonstrate the difference between COBOL and DBase by unfurling the many pages of green bar computer paper code needed to do an update of one field in one one table with COBOL and then showing a five line listing of the DBase code that would do the same thing.

I can do it in about 4 lines of SQL Server stored procedure code, so the comparison with COBOL is not quite apt.

I agree that stored procedures can be obtuse at times, but I persuaded myself that if I wanted to be a good database developer, I had to be proficient with the database tool that does things most effieciently and SP's fit that description for me.