Lists of Items: the fast way and the slow way? What is the right way?

[eluser]Jay Turley[/eluser]
Thanks for that bit of knowledge.

I'm not worried about writing complex joins; that's old hat. My question is more about doing the Right Thing ™.

I mean, if I were building some sort of massive application with an application server that could persist objects in memory, then I would build a list of of little Foo()s and hold them in memory until I could do a massive batch save, thus cutting out the db layer.

But since CI does not have a persistent app layer (not that I mind, you get me?) I am wondering if it is worth the trouble to try to resuse the Foo() objects or if I should just do the easy way.

The problem is it's TOO DAMN EASY!!! (eyes code suspiciously)