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Using Startup Stored Procedures

John Morehouse explains how to set up a startup stored procedure, as well as some of the risks involved:

Startup procedures automatically execute whenever SQL Server is started.  Where would you use this?  One example is if you had an application that required the use of a global temporary table, you could use a startup procedure to create it.  This would allow the table to be immediately accessible to any application that requires it.

Another possibility is that you could “warm up” the cache so that data is already cached when an application needs it.  This would help prevent that initial I/O hit the first time the query is called, thus potentially improving initial performance.

Click through for details.  I’ve created a couple of these, but they rarely come to mind and that’s one of the big problems:  if there is an issue, there’s probably quite a bit of investigative work that would take place before somebody remembers that hey, these things exist.