[siddboots]

Depends on the application really. The operation itself would surely be slower than a specialised mmul, but there can be big advantages to keeping it inside your database if you can phrase most of your problems in terms of simple linear algebra operations.

In other words, numpy is damn-fine with matrices, but if you can replace DBMS->network->ORM->numpy->ORM->network->DBMS with just some SQL, it's pretty clear which will be faster.

On the other hand, if your data isn't already in an RDBMS in matrix-like tables, there is little point in moving it to one just so you can use tricks like the one mentioned in this article.