Comment by sharpy
3 months ago
Once upon a time, as an intern, I had the 'fun' task of optimizing the performance of a stored procedure written by someone with a math phd. It was more than 6 pages when printed, and took more than 30 minutes to run (it was used in billing), and had no tests.
Ended up rewriting it in native code, and it run in less than a second. Most of the work was proving it produced same results... and writing and documenting test cases, so next person wouldn't have to go through that.
After that experience, I have generally avoided putting a lot of business logic in SQL...
I definitely see how this happens. SQL is easy to start with but sup hard to master. And it requires good data models.
But if both are fine there is no way that any native code will be faster than a database. No network latency, set operations, index usage, etc. DBs have all the the info to make data access fast.
I wrote a 120 line sql procedure that replaced a 8k line java royalty payment processor.