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  • The middle of the answer seems to be attacking a straw man. You assume that the formulae are an unvalidated string that could break things, and then you negatively judge that approach that you assumed might be the case. I don't see a basis for this claim, given that (a) we don't know what the formulae contain, (b) nor how they are stored, (c) nor how they are validated/restricted, (d) nor do we see how they are actually used inside the BuildResultsQuery. Any one of these can be doing things a different way from the one specific (bad) way you've assumed it works. Commented Nov 15, 2023 at 21:56
  • shrug there's always a bit of guesswork in answering, OP has said that the BuildResultQuery produces a string, I state my assumptions, answer 2 covers the case you seem to be talking about, where the calculations are performed on the DB, but are restricted to some set of known safe, and de/serialiseable operations you can handle in code. Commented Nov 15, 2023 at 22:34
  • Reasonable assumptions in answering is fine, I agree this is sometimes a necessity as we can't afford a lengthy back and forth. However, such assumptions should be tangential to the answer, it shouldn't be the focal point for the answer's conclusion. "OP has said that the BuildResultQuery produces a string" says nothing about what the formulae are and if they've been validated, and how rigorously they've been validated, and if validation is even needed (e.g. if there's no risk of accessing data that you don't already get to access anyway). Commented Nov 15, 2023 at 22:37
  • tbh i think ive added enough "I presumes" , "normalys" and "usuallys" to cover my arse, but sure, im taking a view here I think thats the main difference between our answering style. I like to keep it short but opinionated. If its hits the mark then its a great and useful answer, if it doesn't then yeah it's useless. But I think overall its more helpful to the questioner than an answer that covers all the bases but doesnt really offer a solution Commented Nov 15, 2023 at 22:41
  • Thanks for the comments and for narrow it to 3 decision points. The number 3 is definitely new to me and I will explore in that area. Fortunately, the team is open to have a few different implementations to compare and let the best to survive. Commented Nov 16, 2023 at 0:54