▶️ Watch the video tutorial (6 minutes)
You're loading 10,000 orders into memory just to calculate totals. Your server is crying, your users are waiting, and there's a better way. What if the database could do all that math in milliseconds without consuming precious RAM?
In this episode of Laravel In Practice, I show you how to move calculations from PHP collections to SQL aggregations while keeping your architecture clean. You'll learn to create an OptimizedSalesReportService that uses the query builder instead of Eloquent collections, leverage SQL's SUM() and COUNT() functions to calculate totals at the database level, and use proper joins to prevent N+1 queries while aggregating data.
The result? The same business logic now runs with a fraction of the memory usage. Instead of loading thousands of orders into PHP arrays, the database handles the heavy lifting where it's optimized for these operations. You'll see exactly how GROUP BY with SELECT RAW transforms memory-hungry collection methods into efficient SQL queries.
This continues our Performance Optimization journey, building on the index improvements from Episode 6. We're not throwing away the clean architecture from Series 1 - we're creating an optimized service that extends our original, giving you the best of both worlds: clean code and blazing performance.
Whether you're dealing with large datasets or just want more efficient code, these techniques are game-changing. You'll understand when to use query builder vs Eloquent, how to write performant aggregations with selectRaw(), and why pushing calculations to the database dramatically improves both speed and memory usage.
The SQL optimization strategies we implement here complete our database-level improvements. Next episode, we'll add smart caching on top of these optimizations for even better performance.
