oracle - Business Logic: Database or Application Layer

Question

The age old question. Where should you put your business logic, in the database as stored procedures ( or packages ), or in the application/middle tier? And more importantly, Why?

Assume database independence is not a goal.

Answer 1

Maintainability of your code is always a big concern when determining where business logic should go.

Integrated debugging tools and more powerful IDEs generally make maintaining middle tier code easier than the same code in a stored procedure. Unless there is a real reason otherwise, you should start with business logic in your middle tier/application and not in stored procedures.

However when you come to reporting and data mining/searching, stored procedures can often a better choice. This is thanks to the power of the databases aggregation/filtering capabilities and the fact you are keeping processing very close the the source of the data. But this may not be what most consider classic business logic anyway.