I understand where the author is coming from, and for purposes of aggregation or filtering, they are correct; it’s often better to do those things in SQL. Th

I understand where the author is coming from, and for purposes of aggregation or filtering, they are correct; it’s often better to do those things in SQL. There are two problems, though. CPU and IOs on your DB server are likely your organization’s most scarce resource, and SQL is often hard to test and has unpredictable performance characteristics (cliffs, blocking, etc). By all means do the things you must do to get your app servers the data they need with the fewest IOs and bytes across the wire possible, but please do your string concatenation and sorting (when not using TOP or LIMIT) on cheap app servers that you can always deploy more of.