stored procedures vs. functions

Hi,

My team and I are building a system and my buddy and I are in charge of building the database. I just have a question regarding whether we should use stored procedures or functions for interaction between our system and our database.

Personally I am on the side of using functions because they return something, unlike stored procedures. This is a crucial advantage because we want the client side to know if the interaction with the database was successful or not.

So do stored procedures have some way of returning an answer as to whether it was successful at its job? I know there are exception statements but what happens if u direct a msg to STDOUT? does it go back to da place where da stored procedure was called from?

Thanks in advance for clearing this issue up for us, we really appreciate it!

Try using OUT or IN/OUT parameters in your procedure.

-wb-

is there a way to set out parameters with a prepared statement?
I'm working in java, and it does not have a method "registerOutParameter" like a regular callable statement does.
thanks