title: Are stored procedures required for large data sets?
body: <p>I've just started my first development job for a reasonably sized company that has to manage a lot of data. An average database is 6gb (from what I've seen so far). One of the jobs is reporting. How it's done currently is - </p>
  
  <p>Data is replicated and transferred onto a data warehouse. From there, all the data required for a particular report is gathered (thousands of rows and lots of tables) and aggregated to a reports database in the warehouse. This is all done with stored procedures.</p>
  
  <p>When a report is requested, a stored procedure is invoked which copies the data onto a reports database which PHP reads from to display the data.</p>
  
  <p>I'm not a big fan of stored procs at all. But the people I've spoken to insist that stored procedures are the only option, as queries directly against the data via a programming language are incredibly slow (think 30 mins?). Security is also a concern.</p>
  
  <p>So my question is - are stored procedures required when you have a very large data set? Do queries really take that long on such a large amount of data or is there a problem with either the DB servers or how the data is arranged (and indexed?). I've got a feeling that something is wrong.</p>