Re: Why are stored procedures looked on so negatively?

On 24/07/13 14:21, Gauthier, Dave wrote:
> I find stored procedures to be a God-send. The alternative, external code, is the risky, difficult and often poorer performing approach to the problems sp's solve. What better way to interact programatically with your database than WITH your database?
>
> The only people that I see frown upon them don't understand them, are afraid of them, and so find ways to justify their views about them in negative terms. I suppose that's human nature. But once they get "turned on" to stored procedures, their views change.
>
> As for selling sp's to them, especially if they are management, there's nothing more convincing than a demo. And a real good way to demo their effectiveness is through a remote connection, preferrably across a time zone or two, where the task involves many (hundreds of thousands) of queries that the external script would have to do one at a time, over the net. The sp would just run them inside as part of the sp call, locally, in a tiny fraction of the time.
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: pgsql-general-owner(at)postgresql(dot)org [mailto:pgsql-general-owner(at)postgresql(dot)org] On Behalf Of Some Developer
> Sent: Tuesday, July 23, 2013 8:29 PM
> To: pgsql-general(at)postgresql(dot)org
> Subject: [GENERAL] Why are stored procedures looked on so negatively?
>
> I've done quite a bit of reading on stored procedures recently and the consensus seems to be that you shouldn't use them unless you really must.
>
> I don't understand this argument. If you implement all of your logic in the application then you need to make a network request to the database server, return the required data from the database to the app server, do the processing and then return the results. A stored procedure is going to be a lot faster than that even if you just take away network latency / transfer time.
>
> I'm in the middle of building a database and was going to make extensive use of stored procedures and trigger functions because it makes more sense for the actions to happen at the database layer rather than in the app layer.
>
> Should I use them or not?
>
>
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Thank you all for the responses. I feel better about making use of them now.

Now for one final question: I was planning on using plpython2u to write
my stored procedures since Python is a language I am very familiar with.
I understand that many people would want to use plpgsql instead but
it'll be quicker for me to do it in Python.

Will there be much of a performance difference between the two at all?
Are there any very convincing arguments that will make me use plpgsql
instead or does it not really matter?