performance - is php sort better than mysql "order by"?

Question

I was wondering if, in terms of performance and considering a mysql select on a table with very very very many (> 1.000.000) records, is better sorting results with sql "order by" or sorting results after the query with classical programming sort algorithm ... someone has any suggestion?

Tanks

Answer 1

mySQL, hands down. It's optimized to do this, and can make use of indexes. This would be horrible to do in PHP (and you would reach the memory_limit quickly).