It comes down to performance and sometimes what your hardware constraints are e.g. your DB is a faster machine than your web server and you have no say in the m

It comes down to performance and sometimes what your hardware constraints are e.g. your DB is a faster machine than your web server and you have no say in the matter. You may also benefit from precalculating stuff in the DB and storing it. I wrote this 6 years ago which illustrates the point: http://markmaunder.com/2007/07/20/how-to-create-a-zip-code-distance-lookup-table/ http://markmaunder.com/2007/07/20/how-to-create-a-zip-code-d...