Xia Rong,

I think some investment bank departments have as much business logic in stored proc as in java. Here are some non-trivial topics that take years and many projects to learn:

* performance tuning, since stored procs often become a performance bottleneck.
* nested stored proc
* temp table perf tuning in a stroed proc
* temp table in nested stored proc
* batching large transactions
* transaction log getting full
* massive multi-threaded update/insert/delete
* cursors, which are less used in sybase, but i think my team will use cursors more in IBM DB2 next year.

Topics below are important to SQL programming, and consequently important to stored procedure too.
* analyzing query plan
* optimizer override (for example with temp tables in a stroed proc)
* sybase’s special features in the UPDATE statement
* dynamic sql. Microsoft and sybase support it. Not sure about others.
* nulls in Transact-SQL

Let me know if you need some books on these topics.