This tutorial teaches you how to create, test, and deploy a DB2 SQL stored procedure. Stored procedures can help improve application performance and reduce database access traffic. All database access must go across the network, which, in some cases, can result in poor performance. For each SQL statement, a database manager application must initiate a separate communication with DB2. To improve application performance, you can create stored procedures that run on your database server. A client application can then simply call the stored procedures to obtain results of the SQL statements that are contained in the procedure. Because the stored procedure runs the SQL statement on the server for you, database performance is improved. In addition, stored procedures can help to centralize business logic. If you make changes to a stored procedure, the changes are immediately available to all client applications that use it.