: Working with tables, best method

<snip>
Whenever an SQL person says that, the rest of their statement is pretty
much lost on me, because the only thing that matters is the end is
performance. As soon as you start giving up performance in order to
make writing and maintaining the code easier, you are on a slippery
slope.
</snip>

Definitely on the opposite end of the world on this one. For me, the
number one thing is that the program is maintainable. The fact this it
takes me extra 2/tenths of a second to use an SQL statement vs. making a
program maintainable, I will take maintainability every time.

Now that is not to say that I do not tune for performance. I am a big
nut for getting the best performance but not at the cost of
maintainability.

Of course, my experience has always been that a properly designed
database and program will have both high performance and
maintainability.

I have spent thirty years going in behind other programmers and
rewriting code that went from minutes or hours to seconds or minutes
just by thinking about really needed to be done and watching the code
vanish.

The best article I ever read on programming was an article in Dr. Dobb's
Journal called "In Search Of Elegance" that argued that correct code was
elegant code and the hallmark of elegance is that as you work, the code
just keep vanishing and my experience has always been that elegance also
means good or excellent performance.

Now that my opinion.