PostgreSQL, Second Edition

Choosing an Application Environment

When you choose an environment for your code, there are a number of issues to consider. To start with, you have to decide whether the feature that you want to build should be server-side code, client-side code, or a combination of both.

Server-Side Code

There are several advantages to adding functionality as server-side code.

The first consideration is performance. If you are creating an application that needs to access many rows of data, it will execute faster on the server. You won't have to send the data across the network to the client (network traffic is very expensive in terms of performance).

Next, you should consider code reuse. If you add a feature in the form of a server-side function, that feature ...