Re: Most performant way to code client script.

"Christian Tischler" <christian_at_myunix.net> wrote in message news:dbd3oq$d8e$1_at_online.de...
> Hi,
> I need to code some tool to get data from an Oracle database. The data
> will then be processed with some mathematical algorithms and then
> analyzed. As this is my first time using a database for something other
> than mere data storage I have some questions. If this is not the right
> list for my questions I apologize.
> 1) I it possible to run mathematic functions (statistical analysis and
> stuff like that) directly on the oracle DB?
> 2) What is the most performant DLL/lib/etc. to access the DB. We plan to
> implement the algorithms in C or C#.
>
> I would be very thankful if you could post an answer, links and/or books.
>
> thanks in advance
>
> Christian Tischler

Use good computer science practices.
  Don't retrieve data you don't need.
  Don't retrieve data again and again if you really don't need to.   Write efficient algorithiums
    If things are not performing then find out what is the highest cost and work towards reducing it.

I worked for an Actuarial Consulting firm at one point as an internal consultant and individual pension calculations would take 3 minutes. The immediate blame was put on the interpreted language we were developing in. Using the built in profiler the pain or bottleneck was clear, the frequent calls to the database took up about 2 minutes 55 seconds of the 3 minutes. Gee, if you made that faster or more efficient you could significantly reduce calculation time. It turns out they were calculating highest average pay 60 consecutive out of 120 months. So they would retrieve the all the pay data 120 times! Once we eliminated that - about 1 hour of work, then calculation times became 6 seconds. 3 of those seconds were retrieving data so even if the calculation routines were instant the best one could do is 3 seconds per calculation. So the conventional wisdom of compiled code is the only way to go isn't always true. In our case the whole system would have been very expensive to develop in C. (the compiled language for the platform we were using at the time.)

Jim Received on Sun Jul 17 2005 - 11:37:15 CDT