Basically, "it depends". having dealt with extremely DB-intensive applications, I have developed a personal motto of "be nice to the DB".
Let the DB be a secure storage of your data, not a calculating part of your application. But like the top answer says, sometimes it is not practical to do a calculation within the application. In my case, we had a few database servers set aside just for reporting, so we could slam them with difficult queries and not worry about affecting data.
Basically, "it depends". having dealt with extremely DB-intensive applications, I have developed a personal motto of "be nice to the DB".
Let the DB be a secure storage of your data, not a calculating part of your application. But like the top answer says, sometimes it is not practical to do a calculation within the application. In my case, we had a few database servers set aside just for reporting, so we could slam them with difficult queries and not worry about affecting data.