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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-24T17:10:07+00:00

For instance, say I have a data structure with two integer columns start and

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For instance, say I have a data structure with two integer columns start and end, but I’m actually interested in the start and difference between start and end values.

I could send this query:

SELECT start, end - start FROM foo;

or, I could just do

SELECT start, end FROM foo;

and perform the $end - $start operation in PHP. Is it better to leave these sorts of simple operations to MySQL?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I would classify “$end – $start” as business logic, and that belongs in the model layer not the persistence layer. That means performing the calculation in PHP. This has a number of benefits:

    • If you change databases later, you don’t need the same operators to exist.

    • You can source control the logic that performs the calculation.

    • You can more thoroughly unit test.

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