water here again.

clearly, the database dominates the time used.

assuming the algorithm driving the db isn't dumb (say, pulling back rows to sum them in perl would likely be dumb, when instead the db could have done the sum quicker, or, even better, an agg table in the db could have precomputed the sum and cached it),

then (and here's my question again)

is it foolish to worry about the speed of the perl side?

thanks all for the good insights

water