Sorting on the server or on the client?

Question

I had a discussion with a colleague at work, it was about SQL queries and sorting. He has the opinion that you should let the server do any sorting before returning the rows

Answer 1

It depends... Is there paging involved? What's the max size of the data set? Is the entire dataset need to be sorted the same one way all the time? or according to user selection? Or, (if paging is involved), is it only the records in the single page on client screen need to be sorted? (not normally acceptable) or does the entire dataset need to be sorted and page one of the newly sorted set redisplayed?

What's the distribution of client hardware compared to the processing requirements of this sort operation?

bottom line is; It's the overall user experience (measured against cost of course), that should control your decision... In general client machines are slower than servers, and may cause additional latency. ... ... But how often will clients request additional custom sort operations after initial page load? (client sort of data already on client is way faster than round trip...) But sorting on client always requires that entire dataset be sent to client on initial load... That delays initials page display.. which may require lazy loading, or AJAX, or other technical complexities to mitigate...

Sorting on server otoh, introduces additional scalability issues and may require that you add more boxes to the server farm to deal with additional load... if you're doing sorting in DB, and reach that threshold, that can get complicated. (To scale out on DB, you have to implement some read-only replication scheme, or some other solution that allows multiple servers (each doing processing) to share read only data)..