CODEWITHSUNDEEP
database
cg7
cg7

Reputation: 199

Is it faster to filter tables in programming or in database?

Is it currently worth it to use filters and operations inside SQL language? i have been working lately with heavy tables and it just seems faster to bring the whole table and use any tool the current programming language has to do whatever i need with the table.

While i understand it should come to the machine running the program, arent most machines currently capable of outperforming the processing of a query with just table variable tweaking? or is it just a lucky shot i had been having better results this way?

Upvotes: 3

Views: 3515

Answers (1)

naedozi
naedozi

Reputation: 78

Short answer, it is faster to filter in the database. The reason you are getting faster results from filtering your data in your application is probably due to bad database design. Often caused by missing indexes.

For an example, say you have a table named Student that represented all the students in a specific college. Let's also assume that this has a field to represent their GPA and that we want a query that returns only students with a GPA higher than 3.0. If the field GPA had a proper index on it, it would always be faster to do check for this in the SQL query itself. If you did not have a proper index on the GPA field, it may be faster to do this in application code.

If you want to know more about database indexing, here's another question someone asked about that: How does database indexing work?.

Upvotes: 5

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