Sorting in Array vs Sorting in SQL

Well, there are three options:

1. Sort in the SQL
2. Sort server-side, in your ASP code
3. Sort client-side, in your Javascript

There's little reason to go with (2), I'd say. It's meat and drink to a database to sort as it returns data: that's what a database is designed to do.

But there's a strong case for (3) if you want to have a button that the user can click. This means it's all done client-side, so you have no need to send anything to the web server. If you have only a few rows (and 1000 is really very few these days), it'll feel much faster, because you won't have to wait for sending the request and getting a response.

Realistically, if you've got so many things that Javascript is too slow as a sorting mechanism, you've got too many things to display them all anyway.

In short, if this is a one-off thing for displaying the initial page, and you don't want the user to have to interact with the page and sort on different columns etc., then go with (1). But if the user is going to want to sort things after the page has loaded, then (3) is your friend.

Short Answer

Ah... screw it: there's no short answer to a question like this.

Longer Answer

The best solution depends on a lot of factors. The question is somewhat vague, but for the sake of simplicity let's assume that the 1000 rows are stored in the database and are being retrieved by the client. Now, a few things to get out of the way:

1. Performance can mean a variety of things in a variety of situations.
2. Sorting is (relatively) expensive, no matter where you do it.
3. Sorting is least expensive when done in the database, as the database already has the all the necessary data and is optimized for these operations.
4. Posting a question on SO to "prove your manager wrong" is a bad idea. (The question could easily have been asked without mentioning the manager.)

Your manager believes that you should upload all the data to the client and do all the processing there. This idea has some merit. With a reasonably sized dataset processing on the client will almost always be faster than making a round trip to the server. Here's the caveat: you have to get all of that data to the client first, and that can be a very expensive operation. 1000 rows is already a big payload to send to a client. If your data set grows much larger then you would be crazy to send all of it at once, particularly if the user really only needs a few rows. In that case you'll have to do some form of paging on the server side, sending chunks of data as the user requests it, usually 10 or 20 rows at a time. Once you start paging at the server your sorting decision is made for you: you have no choice but to do your sorting there. How else would you know which rows to send?

For most "line-of-business" apps your query processing belongs in the database. My generalized recommendation: by all means do your sorting and paging in the database, then return the requested data to the client as a JSON object. Please don't regenerate the entire web page just to update the data in the grid. (I've made this mistake and it's embarrassing.) There are several JavaScript libraries dedicated solely to rendering grids from AJAX data. If this method is executed properly your page will be incredibly responsive and your database will do what it does best.

We had a problem similar to this at my last employer. we had to return large sets of data efficiently, quickly and consistently into a datagridview object.

The solution that they came up was to have a set of filters the user could use to narrow down the query return and to set the maximum number of rows returned at 500. Sorting was then done by the program on an array of those objects.

The reasons behind this were:

1. Most people will not not process that many rows, they are usually looking for a specific item (Hence the filters)
2. Sorting on the client side did save the server a bunch of time, especially when there was the potential for thousands of people to be querying the data at the same time.
3. Performance of the GUI object itself started to become an issue at some point (reason for limiting the returns)

I hope that helps you a bit.