How to query a stored procedure in SQL

If you have ever needed to query an existing stored procedure in an ad-hoc SQL query then probably the most common method is to create a temp table (or table variable), execute the sp, and insert the result set into the temp table (see stack overflow article here). But this involves manually specifying the columns, and if your result set has more than a few columns it can be tedious and off-putting.

Fortunately there is another solution that allows a direct query of a stored procedure's result set without having to build temp tables (thanks to Erland Sommarskog for the info).

OPENQUERY allows you to query a stored procedure in the same way you query a base table, similar to querying a query in MS Access, and even allows joins between different sps.

For example, if I have two stored procs on my local server, PaymentUpsert and MilestoneUpsert, I can run the following select statement using OPENQUERY:

SELECT p.Status__c
,m.Status__c
FROM OPENQUERY(LT010, 'EXEC StagingArea.dbo.PaymentUpsert') AS p
JOIN OPENQUERY(LT010, 'EXEC StagingArea.dbo.MilestoneUpsert') AS m
ON p.[Milestone__r:External_Id__c] = m.External_Id__c
WHERE p.Status__c = 'Completed';


If you get an error telling you that your server instance is not configured for data access then you can run the following query to allow access:

EXEC sp_serveroption 'LocalServerName', 'DATA ACCESS', TRUE;

Be aware that setting your local server data access to true may have security implications for you and your network. See data acess article on technet and also article on openquery.