When a stored procedure is created, the text of the procedure is stored in the syscomments table of the current database. In addition, a normalized form of the procedure, called a query tree, is stored in the sysprocedures table of the current database.
The process of building a query tree is called resolution. This process parses the SQL statements into a more efficient format and resolves all referenced objects into their internal representations. During the resolution process, table names, for example, are resolved into their object IDs, and column names are resolved into their column IDs.