[dagss]

I think there are two different concerns here though:

The article recommends something that may lead to using the wrong query plans. In the "right" conditions, you will do full table scans of all your data for every query.

This is making the DB waste a lot of CPU (and IO).

Wasting resources like that is different from just where to do work that has to be done anyway!

I am a proponent of shifting logic toward the DB, because likely it ends up there anyway and usually you reduce the resource consumption also for the DB to have as much logic as possible in the DB.

The extreme example is you want to sum(numbers) -- it is so much faster to sum it in one roundtrip to the DB, than to do a thousand roundtrips to the DB to fetch the numbers to sum them on the client. The latter is so much more effort also for the DB server's resources.

My point is: Usually it is impossible to meaningfully shift CPU work to the client of the DB, because the client needs the data, so it will ask for it, and looking up the data is the most costly operation in the DB.

[cogman10]

The answer is "it depends".

Sum is a good thing to do in the Db because it's low cost to the db and reduces io between the db and app.

Sort can be (depending on indexes) a bad thing for a db because that's CPU time that needs to be burned.

Conditional logic is also (often) terrible for the db because it can break the optimizer in weird ways and is just as easily performed outside the db.

The right action to take is whatever optimizes db resources in the long run. That can sometimes mean shifting to the db, and sometimes it means shifting out of the db.

[crazygringo]

It's hard to think of situations where you don't want to do the sorting on the DB. If you're sorting small numbers of rows it's cheap enough that it doesn't matter, and if you're sorting large numbers of rows you should be using an index which makes it vastly more efficient than it could be in your app.

And if your conditional logic is breaking the optimizer then the solution is usually to write the query more correctly. I can't think of a single instance where I've ever found moving conditional logic out of a query to be meaningfully more performant. But maybe there's a specific example you have in mind?

[cogman10]

> if you're sorting large numbers of rows you should be using an index

Perhaps, depends on what the table is doing and needs to be optimized for.

Indexes are not free, they have a write penalty as they need to be updated every time the data in the index is updated.

> I can't think of a single instance where I've ever found moving conditional logic out of a query to be meaningfully more performant. But maybe there's a specific example you have in mind?

Certainly.

In one of our applications we effectively represent the types as subtables with a root table for the parent type. There were roughly 10 different types with different columns per type.

One way the queries were written, which is slow, was that on insertion the client app would send in (effectively) a block of data with all columns for these types to insert. In the database, the conditional logic would pull out the type id from the input and make the decision on that type information for which subtable would be inserted.

There's really no way to make this something the SQL optimizer can well consume.

The right solution was to instead break this up in the application and per type do the insertions directly into the table type in question. It simplified both sides of the code and ran faster.

[dagss]

I agree that for a) inserts and b) single entity access -- in both these cases the backend can do a lot of the preparation. And your example is both a) and b). We are then in O(1) optimization territory.

If you are only processing a single entity -- the backend should tell the DB exactly what to do. And one shouldn't have if-statements in SQL of course that is "doing it wrong".

But if you have a chunk of 10000 entities like that in your example, all of different types, then you will have to insert some subset of data into all those tables (1000 in one tables, 500 another table, and so on). That logic is well suited for where conditions without much overhead.

But yes for inserts most of the logic can usually be shifted to the DB client as that is where the data resides already. The problem I was talking about was meaningfully shifting for to the client for queries, where the client has no data to work with and must fetch it from the DB.

Let us take your example and turn it into "fetch 10000 such objects". Fetching the right rows for all of them at once using joins and where conditions (+temporary tables and multiple return sets in the same query roundtrip) is going to be more efficient for the DB than the backend first fetching the type, then branching on type, then fetching from another table and so on.

[cogman10]

> Fetching the right rows for all of them at once using joins and where conditions (+temporary tables and multiple return sets in the same query roundtrip) is going to be more efficient for the DB than the backend first fetching the type, then branching on type, then fetching from another table and so on.

Nope, not if done correctly.

Now, this isn't to say there's not valid reasons to do it all at once in the DB, the chief among them being ACID requirements. However, from an efficiency standpoint both for the application and the DB the most efficient action is to first request from the parent table and then turn around and, in parallel, send out requests for the child tables of the various types as needed.

Assuming you have a connection pool, the overhead of doing multiple requests in parallel is small. The DB has less data to lookup. The DB has less temporary memory to store (which in our case was a problem). The response io is smaller (not a bunch of empty columns sent back) and both the DB and the downstream application are capable of querying against these tables in parallel.

There is a latency downside in needing the load up the parent table first, if the datasize is large enough then you could overcome that problem by making batch requests to the DB as the parent dataset comes back. Say every 1k values of a given type start the parallel request to load that data.

Splitting the request into these smaller and parallel requests also has systemic benefits to the DB, new writers are able to sneak in which isn't possible when you try to do everything at one go (another issue we had).

The added benefit here is the optimizer in the DB is more likely to do the right thing for the subtable requests than it is for the temp table mess request. A simple fetch is far easier to optimize than a complex one.

[crazygringo]

> However, from an efficiency standpoint both for the application and the DB the most efficient action is to first request from the parent table and then turn around and, in parallel, send out requests for the child tables of the various types as needed.

This is not true. It is generally considered an anti-pattern.

The fundamental reason it is not true is because it is generally orders of magnitude faster for the DB to do a join or subquery within the same query, rather than perform an entire query, output it, transfer potentially large amounts of data across the network, process that, do the whole thing in reverse, etc.

I don't know how you learned that queries should be split up like that, but it is generally horrendous from a performance standpoint. There is no "correct" way to do it that can compensate for the massive overhead. The correct way is to do it all in a single query with joins and subqueries (including possibly correlated subqueries) whenever possible.

Perhaps you learned this pattern from a services architecture, where it is correct because the pieces of data all sit in different services. But when all the data resides in the same database, splitting up queries is not generally something you want to do unless circumstances force you to.