Originally Posted by
pa_sjo
Fair enough, I didn't read the original question properly. Personally i'm a fan of doing this in the code itself* rather in the query, but I doubt either of us can be arsed to do a profiling exercise to display which method is better
* Unless this is in stored proc
Regardless of profiling and performance, this raises a whole host of questions in terms of code stability and maintainability where database structures are inherently stored in non DB code (e.g. linked queries, db updates in application server or web server), as opposed to abstracted by means of stored procedures, functions, packages and views