[...]Suppose you have a table with a million records, test scores from a widely taken exam for example. You need to find the median mark - NOT the average! - so your algorithm needs to read all million records, sort them into ascending or descending sequence by the test score, then read exactly half way through the sequenced list to find the middle record; that's the one that contains the median score.
If that work were to happen on the client, the client would have to fetch a million records, sort them all, then read through half of those records until it found the middle record; then it would report on the median mark. There would clearly be a lot of network traffic involved in getting all those records to the client, sorting them and then reading through the sorted records.
Pardon my ignorance, but why can't you do this (in MySQL) with a "select count ..." and afterwards a "select ... order by... LIMIT"? All the work is done on the server, too. No need for a SP here.
Wolfram
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