[michaeljconner]

>  ... But there will not be a different plan for the root procedure.  Internally we use shared prepared plans for all virtual procedure invocations.

OK, that's the answer I was looking for.  Up till now, it sounded like the optimizer would take all levels and resolve what it needed.  Were that the case, exactly how it did that would be up to it.  (While you may know exactly what it would do, I do not).  If you are saying that the plan for the procedure is essentially separate from the other layers (more or less), then I don't need to worry about it.  We still should test the web service when there's a change to the proc, of course. But it sounds highly unlikely that a change to the proc could result in performance issues only seen in the web service.

Thank you,

Mike