MySQL stored procedures or php code?

Question

A general question, without a specific case in mind - is it usually preferred to use MySQL stored procedures over writing a PHP script that performs the same calculations an

Answer 1

For me, the advantage of keeping anything to do with the database within the database is debugging. If you have your calculations (at least most of them) done within the stored procedure, and you need to make a change, then you just modify it, test it, save it. There would be no changes to your PHP code.

If you're storing major calculations within your PHP code, you need to take the SQL statements from the code, clean it up, then modify it, test it and then copy it back in and test it again.

Ease of maintenance comes to mind with keeping things separate. The code look cleaner, and be easier to read if you use stored procedures, because we all know that come SQL scripts just get to be ridiculously large. Keep all that database logic in the database.

If the database is properly tuned, you'll probably have slightly quicker times for execution of the query, because rather than having PHP parse the string, then send it to the database, then the database executes it and sends it back, you can just push parameters into the database with the stored procedure, it will have a cached execution plan for the stored procedure, and things will be slightly quicker. A few carefully placed indexes can help speed up any data retrieval because really - the web server is just a conduit, and PHP scripts don't load it up that much.