Migrate business logic from database into the business layer (.NET technology)

Question

I have an existing project running in the ASP.NET technology. Currently, the entire business logic calculation is happening in the database sProcs (MS SQL Server). And at times, the application becomes slow when it being used by plenty of users during the busy time of the day.

Now we want to move out some of the business logic processing away from the DB and perform it in the business layer (C#) side. I am trying to understand how do i get the data from the database and perform some calculation on it and then again save the furnished data back to the DB.

I can get the raw data from the DB , then serialize into the XML and then pass this XML to the BL layer. In the BL layer, XML will be De-serialized into the strongly typed business objects. And then using the Linq-to-Object, i can perform some operations (such as Sum, Avg etc) on it.

Please advise with your suggestions.

Answer 1

Be careful! If I understand you correctly, what you describe is going to be a lot slower.

Aggregate operations like Sum, Avg etc. is pretty fast if you run them in SQL. They will only be slow if they operate over very large datasets. If you have a large dataset then it will be much slower to transfer the whole dataset to a client and perform the aggregate operation there. Serializing to XML and deserializing again is going to make it even slower.

You should probably investigate carefully why you are having the performance problems in the first place. You might have some locking issues or perhaps inefficient queries.

I think the term business logic is often to broad. Some forms of business logic belongs in the database, and some forms belong in the client. All business logic which perform joining, filtering or aggregating over data belongs in the database. You will just get horrible performance problems if you move this to the client.