C# with SQL database schema question

Question

Is it acceptable to dynamically generate the total of the contents of a field using up to 10k records instead of storing the total in a table?

I have some reasons to prefer on-demand generation of a total, but how bad is the performance price on an average home PC? (There would be some joins -ORM managed- involved in figuring the total.)

Let me know if I'm leaving out any info important to deciding the answer.

EDIT: This is a stand-alone program on a user's PC.

Answer 1

I think that it should not take long, probably less than a second, to generate a sum from 8000-10000 records. Even on a single PC the query plan for this query should be dominated by a single table scan, which will generate mostly sequential I/O.

Proper indexing should make any joins reasonably efficient unless the schema is deeply flawed and unless you have (say) large blob fields in the table the total data volume for the rows should not be very large at all. If you still have performance issues going through an O/R mapper, consider re-casting the functionality as a report where you can control the SQL.

Answer 2

You "could" calculate the total with SQL (I am assuming you do not want total number of records ... the price total or whatever it is). SQL is quite good at mathematics when it gets told to do so :) No storing of total.

But, as it is all run on the client machine, I think my preference would be to total using C#. Then the business rules for calculating the total are out of the DB/SQL. By that I mean if you had a complex calculation for total that reuired adding say 5% to orders below £50 and the "business" changed it to add 10% to orders below £50 it is done in your "business logic" code rather than in your storage medium (in this case SQL).

Kindness,

Dan

Answer 3

If you have appropriate indexing in place, it won't be too bad to do on demand calculations. The reason that I mention indexing is that you haven't specified whether the total is on all the values in a column, or on a subset - if it's a subset, then the fields that make up the filter may need to be indexed, so as to avoid table scans.

Answer 4

Usually it is totally acceptable and even recommended to recalculate values. If you start storing calculated values, you'll face some overhead ensuring that they are always up to date, usually using triggers.

That said, if your specific calculation query turns out to take a lot of time, you might need to go that route, but only do that if you actually hit a performance problem, not upfront.

Answer 5

How offten and by what number of users u must get this total value, how offten data on which total depends are updated.

Maybe only thing you need is to make this big query once a day (or once at all) and save it somewhere in db and then update it when data, on which your total consist, are changed

Answer 6

Using a Sql query you can quickly and inexpensively get the total number of records using the max function.

It is better to generate the total then keep it as a record, the same way as you would keep a persons birth date and determine their age then keep their age.