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Posted by Anith Sen on 06/01/06 17:30
>> Why on earth would you want to go to all the effort of using a 3GL / 4GL
>> to format the data when you can just simply do it in TSQL within the SQL
>> Server itself - nice and simple, nice and easy to support and maintain.
The general answer is that one would prefer to have the centralized database
as generic as possible so that it can support a variety of applications.
Having an application specific formatting at the central data source tend to
generate something called "application bias". Considering the OP's question,
given certain 5 applications requesting same data formatted in 5 different
ways, should he formulate a single generic query and do the formatting in
the application or should he create 5 different queries to support each
application? How about when the number of applications increases to 50? Or
say 500?
While it may appear to be efficient and easy to manage in the short term, it
can often be highly detrimental to the long term stability and management of
data centric systems.
This is nothing new but such bias is known to software engineers for decades
now. For details on why this separation of concern is important for data
oriented systems, ~Principles of Program Design~ by Michael Jackson is a
good book.
--
Anith
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