NYCPHP Meetup

[David Krings]

On 11/10/2010 16:37, Rob Marscher wrote:
> On Nov 10, 2010, at 3:31 PM, Jerry B. Altzman wrote:
>> I know that in the commercial database world use of stored procedures is The Way Things Are Pretty Much Done, but I've not seen it in my brief forays through the bulk of PHP code I've examined (and needless to say, written). Am I just out of it? Is it just not considered usual practice, or am I blind?
>
> Personally, I think stored procedures are useful when you have DBAs in control of the database and critical business logic and they don't trust the developers interacting with the data.  Also useful if you have several different codebases acting on the data.  A lot of php code is done with the least common denominator in mind (i.e. somebody on a free shared hosting account), so it won't take advantage of the advanced tools available (non-default extensions, db features that require more recent versions of mysql [although most are probably on 5.0+ now], etc).
>
> However, if you do essentially have one codebase doing all of your data manipulation and you don't have dedicated DBAs, I think using stored procedures doesn't really make sense because it's dividing up where your business logic is located and potentially making things more confusing or harder to debug.


It also depends on how many systems access your database and perform more or 
less the same tasks. If you have a dozen systems accessing the same database 
then shifting business logic and tasks to the database server will make it 
work the same across all systems. That way you don't have to reinvent the 
wheel and keep it pumped up on every system.
Also, sprocs can help distributing processing load from the web server to the 
database server. Depending on how the systems are used that may be a benefit. 
Besides that, sprocs can be used by other apps that are not written in PHP 
whereas your PHP code cannot. Then again, why would anyone use something other 
than PHP....


David