You don't need stored proccedures at all if you want to ...

My group owns 50 plus J2EE projects (Oracle 10g),and all of them need database. Only one project uses stored procedures because it was written by an Java programmer & a DBA. All other projects have none because they were developed by pure Java programmers. By the way, a lot of projects are very big.

Stored procedures have their places, but they are not always desirable. Now, I own the project with a lot of SPs. Debugging it is not easy because I have to find out the problem was caused by Java code or by SPs.

Also, due to our company policy, any development group doesn't own database any schemas on any production database servers, so we can't modify SPs. We have to send request to DBA which takes at least one week.