Stored procedures, used independently or invoked by rules, can
improve performance in the DBEnvironment.
For applications that access a local DBEnvironment, combining multiple
SQL statements and logic in a stored procedure can improve performance
by reducing the overhead of multiple calls to SQLCore.
For applications that operate on a remote DBEnvironment or in a
client/server environment, each call to SQLCore must travel
across the network. In this environment, the use of stored procedures
can dramatically reduce network traffic and thus improve performance.
It is generally better to place conditions in the FiringCondition
of a rule rather than including them as conditional statements within
the procedure invoked by the rule, to minimize the overhead of procedure
execution. The specification of a FiringCondition minimizes
overhead by avoiding unnecessary procedure calls. For each row
affected by the statement, the FiringCondition is tested, and
the procedure is invoked only when the FiringCondition is satisfied.
Thus, the specification of a FiringCondition can improve the
performance of data manipulation operations on the table on which
the rule is defined.
Since a procedure executed by a rule may itself execute statements
that fire rules, the developer should carefully analyze the
relationships among rules and the procedures invoked by rules to
ensure that the performance implications on data manipulation
statements that fire a chain of rules are well understood.
