groovy sql eachRow and rows method - sql

Question

I am new to grails and groovy.
Can anyone please explain to me the difference between these two groovy sql methods
sql.eachRow
sql.rows
Also, which is more efficient?
I am working on an application that retrieves data from the database(the resultset is very huge) and writes it to CSV file or returns a JSON format.
I was wondering which of the two methods mentioned above to use to have the process done faster and efficient.

Answer 1

Can anyone please explain to me the
difference between these two groovy
sql methods sql.eachRow sql.rows
It's difficult to tell exactly which 2 methods you're referring 2 because there are a large number of overloaded versions of each method. However, in all cases, eachRow returns nothing
void eachRow(String sql, Closure closure)
whereas rows returns a list of rows
List rows(String sql)
So if you use eachRow, the closure passed in as the second parameter should handle each row, e.g.
sql.eachRow("select * from PERSON where lastname = 'murphy'") { row ->
println "$row.firstname"
}
whereas if you use rows the rows are returned, and therefore should be handled by the caller, e.g.
rows("select * from PERSON where lastname = 'murphy'").each {row ->
println "$row.firstname"
}
Also, which is more efficient?
This question is almost unanswerable. Even if I had implemented these methods myself there's no way of knowing which one will perform better for you because I don't know
what hardware you're using
what JVM you're targeting
what version of Groovy you're using
what parameters you'll be passing
whether this method is a bottleneck for your application's performance
or any of the other factors that influence a method's performance that cannot be determined from the source code alone. The only way you can get a useful answer to the question of which method is more efficient for you is by measuring the performance of each.
Despite everything I've said above, I would be amazed if the performance difference between these two was in any way significant, so if I were you, I would choose whichever one you find more convenient. If you find later on that this method is a performance bottleneck, try using the other one instead (but I'll bet you a dollar to a dime it makes no difference).

Answer 2

If we set aside minor syntax differences, there is one difference that seems important. Let's consider
sql.rows("select * from my_table").each { row -> doIt(row) }
vs
sql.eachRow("select * from my_table") { row -> doIt(row) }
The first one opens connection, retrieves results, closes connection and returns them. Now you can iterate over the results while connection is released. The drawback is you now have entire result list in memory which in some cases might be a lot.
EachRow on the other hand opens a connection and while keeping it open executes your closure for each row. If your closure operates on the database and requires another connection your code will consume two connections from the pool at the same time. The connection used by eachRow is released after it iterates though all the resulting rows. Also if you don't perform any database operations but closure takes a while to execute, you will be blocking one database connection until eachRow completes.
I am not 100% sure but possibly eachRow allows you not to keep all resulting rows in memory but access them through a cursor - this may depend on the database driver.
If you don't perform any database operations inside your closure, closure executes fast and results list is big enough to impact memory then I'd go for eachRow. If you do perform DB operations inside closure or each closure call takes significant time while results list is manageable, then go for rows.

Answer 3

They differ in signature only - both support result sets paging, so both will be efficient. Use whichever fits your code.