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Databases Reporting with SQL Working with Text Adding Text Columns Together

Wayne Comber
Wayne Comber
8,169 Points
Posted by Wayne Comber
Wayne Comber
8,169 Points

What is best practice for data manipulation like concatenation?

Just wondering what is considered best practice for this sort of data manipulation? e.g If I am writing a script in PHP, am I better off to manipulate the data all in the database using SQL and bring in just the final results or bring the data into PHP and concatenate and manipulate it there? No doubt there are performance issues involved, so is it faster for the database to do these sorts of operations, or the server/compiler in the front end? Also, is it more secure to do all the manipulation in the database before presenting it to the front end? Thanks :)

1 Answer

Steven Parker
Steven Parker
231,184 Points
Steven Parker
Steven Parker
231,184 Points

There's probably very little performance difference, since you'd be sending a more complicated query but receiving a more compact response. Since I tend to be more "code first" than "data first" in design philosophy, I'd massage the data in the server code. But I don't think it would clearly constitute a "best practice".

Security would only be a factor if manipulating the data in the database prevents the transmission of something sensitive that would be removed later in the server. Even so, it's only a minor improvement if the server still has the ability to query the other elements directly.