[barrkel]

Normally the reason you write anything beyond trivial SQL is because you only have a small amount of code to run and lots of data to run it over. Pushing the code to the data is more efficient than pulling the data to the code.

The latter might be conceptually cleaner (though it's debatable, relational is a fairly nice programming model and a lot more consistent and well-founded than object orientation, for one), but it's seldom optimal.

Three orders of magnitude or more speedups are not unexpected by pushing the code to the data.

[thaumaturgy]

You're basically spot on here. I have a bunch of rows that need to have trend data crunched and updated pretty frequently. Putting this into MySQL cut the server load quite a bit, and it isn't so much business logic that I feel bad about doing it.