I recently have been involved in a lot of refactoring work at my company. One issue we ran into was our usage of SQL in our applications, we had a habit of including a lot of business logic in SQL. To make the applications more maintainable we moved a lot of our business logic from SQL to Java. While I believe we made the right decision to remove the business logic from SQL I don't think it would be in all scenarios. In our situation we were not playing to the strengths of SQL, most of our developers do not have an advanced understanding of SQL, and using Java to handle the business logic allowed for more reusability. I did some research on this subject and wanted to share what I have collected. So should SQL be used for business logic or not?

http://martinfowler.com/articles/dblogic.html
http://blogs.msdn.com/rogerwolterblog/archive/2006/04/04/568351.aspx (an SQL server sales pitch, but informative none the less)
http://www.pbell.com/index.cfm/2008/3/21/Moving-Business-Logic-to-the-Database

Technorati Tags: Best practices, SQL