Who Cares if My App is Slow?
No, really, ask yourself the question: “who cares if my app is slow?” or, perhaps more accurately, why do they care? What is the purpose of the code you’re writing? Whom does it impact? And where is the author going with this?
Today I came across a post on social media discussing the benefits of offloading heavy data operations to the database for improved performance. The logic seems sound: databases are highly optimized for data storage and retrieval, and many developers have witnessed how a piece of well-crafted SQL can work wonders in a fraction of the time their application code would take. Fast is good; we like fast!
So it follows that we should leverage the database wherever possible to squeeze out all of those performance gains, right? Well, maybe in some cases. However, the problem with this line of thinking is that it assumes performance is the ultimate goal without considering the broader context.