At 08:54 AM 3/1/2002, brian moseley wrote: >On Fri, 1 Mar 2002, Matt Sergeant wrote: > > > Given that though, it becomes very easy to see that if > > you do have a large transaction (including multiple > > table updates for example), it's often safer to > > encapsulate that into a single stored procedure than it > > is to write some large chunk of Perl that turns off > > AutoCommit, does the work, and then commits. Plus it > > ensures people can use other languages to execute the > > same transaction. If you want to use SOAP/HTTP to > > emulate a stored procedure to achieve the same effect > > you're welcome to, but beware of the performance. > >beware the tremendously inflated development schedules that >can result from this approach. at critical path, we used a >lot of pl/sql stored procs for validation, integrity checks >and transactions. almost every development schedule for >adding or modifying features to the service was blown out by >the stored proc development effort.
As usual, I suppose it "depends". We use stored procs quite rarely these days with web apps. But I recall in my client/server programmer days that if I had to make a change to business logic in a PowerBuilder app, I'd have to deploy the powerbuilder app to many users. Whereas, if I had a lot of logic in the stored procs, it was quite easy to just update the stored proc. Of course, middleware "could've helped", but back then client/server wasn't called client/middleware/server. :) And back then, middleware servers were even worse than they are today. Actually overall coding in stored procs was fairly easy (on Sybase). However, on a web based application, your code is centralized and not distributed to different workstations, so the value of using stored procs goes down quite a bit. However, if you have many programs accessing a database (Web front-end, VB front end etc) then using stored procs as a poorman's middleware can be a valid architectural decision in some circumstances. And is probably faster than writing SOAP or other middleware (which will also add man-days to your projects). Later, Gunther __________________________________________________ Gunther Birznieks ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) eXtropia - The Open Web Technology Company http://www.eXtropia.com/