GRANT EXECUTE

A lot of SQL Server projects are using stored procedures to control their query behavior (which I like because developers shouldn't be in control of this :p). In previous versions of SQL Server there was something that was kind of disturbing in terms of security. In order to grant execute permissions to a user you had to give permission to every single stored procedure the user needed. When you have 1000 stored procedures you wouldn't want to do this manually so there was the possibility to generate a script by using sysobjects or INFORMATION_SCHEMA.Routines but you need to keep the permissions up-to-date when new procedures were created.

SQL Server 2005 has a great solution to this: GRANT EXECUTE
You can now create a database user role that has execute permissions on all the objects in that database.

CREATE ROLE db_ICanExecute
GO

GRANT EXECUTE TO db_ICanExecute
GO