Re: Math Operations - DB or App?

On 5/9/06 5:37 PM, "Andrej Ricnik-Bay" <andrej(dot)groups(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:

> On 5/10/06, Sean Davis <sdavis2(at)mail(dot)nih(dot)gov> wrote:
>
>> The biggest plus is that most of the data never leaves the server, so
>> client-side overhead, memory issues with the client, and network bandwidth
>> are much less of a problem than it you transfer the who table to the client,
>> for example, to do a couple of simple sums. There are other advantages,
>> like being able to adjust the schema or the functions on the database side
>> and have these changes propagate automatically through to various apps.
> With which operations/what number of calculations does
> the CPU load on the server become a problem, though (compared
> to the network-traffic caused by having it on the client-side)? I can
> think of a few applications/implementations that I wouldn't want to
> be running on the server - where to draw the line?

I would imagine that the answer is very complicated. There are a lot of
details in application design that are being ignored by my answer above.
For example, can data be cached effectively on the client side (or in a web
app, on the webserver)? Is the app DB intensive (lots of concurrent
read/writes) or are there monstrous queries running on the DB all the time
(data mining app, for example)? There are many points that do and should
influence application design, so benchmarking, knowing user needs, hardware
and software constraints, and maintainability all play into the answer, I
think.

Not an answer, I know....

Sean