> At a concept level, that's exactly the same thing.
But at a practical level they very different. If you have a middleware layer as you are describing, it's written in a real programming language with all the adjacent tools (source control, debugging, etc).
I'm not hard-core against stored procedures used lightly but they have a lot of downsides and they simply aren't needed. There's no performance advantage. There are complexity advantages and disadvantages that might be a wash.
But at a practical level they very different. If you have a middleware layer as you are describing, it's written in a real programming language with all the adjacent tools (source control, debugging, etc).
I'm not hard-core against stored procedures used lightly but they have a lot of downsides and they simply aren't needed. There's no performance advantage. There are complexity advantages and disadvantages that might be a wash.