Performance of fomatting string : Java vs Database.

[Ritesh Srivastava]

I have a String which needs be sent to a stored procedure. Then this string is inserted in the database through the stored procedure. But the string needs to be formatted (say date formatting).

This formatting can be done either in the java program which later calls the stored procedure or in the stored procedure itself. Which way gives better performance?

[Ulf Dittmer]

I wouldn't worry about the performance of this, but rather the overall design. Formatting data is really not something that should be done in the DB, or for which DBs are well suited.

[Ritesh Srivastava]

Thanks for the reply. Yes I too agree that database should not be doing formatting. But I am still wondering which approach would be faster.

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

Originally posted by Ritesh Srivastava:
But I am still wondering which approach would be faster.

It depends. You would have to try it out to be sure.

I second Ulf on the performance not being the driving factor here. It is not likely to be the bottleneck of your application.

[steve souza]

I agree with the previous posters. Even if they wanted to answer they couldn't as it depends on too many factors. For example does the database run on a more powerful machine than the jvm or vice versa.

[Ulf Dittmer]

A somewhat unrelated side issue is that JDBC is a string-based API anyway. Any data will be sent to the database as a string, not as (e.g.) a date. So if the formatting were done in the DB, then the date would be formatted to a string by JDBC, then sent to the DB, and then be re-formatted according to your rules (and then be parsed and stored by the DB in its own format, whatever that may be). So just based on that I'd guess that doing the formatting in Java has a chance of being faster.