So just how powerful and efficient is the SQL language? In the previous two sections, we explored both basic and more advanced features of SQL – all of whose functionality (in theory) could be mimicked with just Java (that is, just do a bare-bones SELECT statement to get back the entire table and parse it with Java if statements, and so on). However, it's time to explore if there's an actual added advantage to filtering and manipulating our data on the SQLite end (as opposed to on the Java end), and if so, how much of an advantage it provides. And so, to start, we'll need a much bigger data set to better illustrate the improvements in performance.
First, we create a new table under a new schema which simply has a column for name, state, and income – think of this as a United States database with each family's name, the state they live in, and their family income. The table has 17,576 rows – still not a lot considering the magnitude of some real application...