Should I write more SQL to be more efficient, or less SQL to be less buggy?

Posted by RenderIn on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by RenderIn
Published on 2010-03-31T18:17:05Z Indexed on 2010/03/31 18:33 UTC
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I've been writing a lot of one-off SQL queries to return exactly what a certain page needs and no more.

I could reuse existing queries and issue a number of SQL requests linear to the number of records on the page. As an example, I have a query to return People and a query to return Job Details for a person. To return a list of people with their job details I could query once for people and then once for each person to retrieve their job details. I've found that in most cases that solution returns things in a reasonable amount of time, but I don't know how well it will scale in my environment. Instead I've been writing queries to join people + job details, or people + salary history, etc.

I'm looking at my models and I see how I could shave off maybe 30% of my code if I were to re-use existing queries. This is a big temptation. Is it a bad thing to go for reuse over efficiency in general or does it all come down to the specific situation? Should I first do it the easy way and then optimize later, or is it best to get the code knocked out while everything is fresh in my mind? Thoughts, experiences?

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