PostgreSQL Server Programming - Second Edition

Wrapping up – why program in the server?

The main advantages of doing most data manipulation code on the server-side are stated in the following sections.

Performance

Doing the computation near the data is almost always a performance win, as the latencies to get the data are minimal. In a typical data-intensive computation, most of the time is spent in getting the data. Therefore, making data access inside the computation faster is the best way to make the whole thing fast. On my laptop, it takes 2.2 ms to query one random row from a 1,000,000-row database into the client, but it takes only 0.12 ms to get the data inside the database. This is 20 times faster and inside the same machine over Unix sockets. The difference can be bigger if there is ...