Can you explain this some more? You don't really list what you're trying to achieve in your example and I can't think of a case where looping over a large data set in code is better than querying against it.
Once I had this problem with a calendar on some application from a client. It was a month calendar and for every day there were some conditions that needed to be verified: is it an holiday?, is it fully scheduled?, is there at least one person available that day?, and so on.
How was it working? Well, for every day it would query the database for each one of those conditions which would in the end sum up to 5 minutes since it was a not so small dataset.
So how could we fix this? I started with the usual approach, let's just try to get this done in one query and some joins. There was some improvement but it as a messy query full of joins and even some sub-queries. It took something like 20 seconds to load that calendar and that wasn't enough.
Next approach: divide the most complex joins and sub-queries in some really simple queries. Examples: get a set of all the holidays, get a set of all the fully booked days, etc. Then, when you loop to show the calendar you just check if the iterating day is on the holidays set, then on the next one until you find one that works; if you don't just leave it blank. This made the calendar loading right away.
Benefits: cleaner and (much) quicker code (and also easier to cache if you can, just cache each query individually since some of them don't change that often, like holidays).
Is it making any sense now?
Also, at the surface, this seems like it would be a good application for using materialized views. I obviously don't know the ins and outs of what the usage here was, but this seems like a case where slowing down the insert would be a good speed sacrifice for retrieval.
I'm not going to even feign being an expert at database optimization, but that seems like it might be a more efficient way to approach it.
It feels really good to learn something new, I'm thinking of some scenarios which might improve with this type of views, thanks!