what's a better code design priciple?

[Mike Bilow]

Tough call.  In general, the higher the level of abstraction at which
optimization can be performed, the more effective the optimization.  In
other words, a human programmer who understands the overall goal has the
potential to be more effective at optimization than a compiler or a
processing engine, often by orders of magnitude.

On the other hand, issuing multiple queries to a database can often
produce a lot of extra overhead in terms of locking and in treating
intermediate results, so you are usually going to be better off letting
the SQL engine do internal optimizations.  If the complicated query causes
a lot of operations which generate intermediate data that just gets thrown
away, however, then a chain of simpler queries might make more sense.

Ultimately, the only way to know is to measure both ways.  Even this is no
absolute assurance, since your benchmark might be affected by the size of
the database, the number of running indices, and other variable factors.

-- Mike


On 2000-05-30 at 14:16 -0400, Christoph Doerbeck A242369 wrote:

> 	a) use multiple simple SQL queries requiring additional code 
> 	b) increase SQL complexibilty, use one query and reduce code size


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