Benchmarking data tiers

Choosing your data tier is not always an objective choice. So I've decided to setup a data tier benchmarker. Here's how it works:

First I started choosing a simple entity: a Category.

Then I defined a simple data tier facade for it, as follows:

public interface IDataFacade

{

void Create(ISessionFacade sessionFacade, Category category);

Category Read(ISessionFacade sessionFacade, int key);

IList<Category> PagedRead(ISessionFacade sessionFacade, int page, int pageSize);

void Update(ISessionFacade sessionFacade, Category category);

void Delete(ISessionFacade sessionFacade, Category category);

}

 

As you certainly already noticed, I create another interface to façade the data tier session - ISessionFacade.

 

Then I created the integration test as follows:   

 

Category newCategory = new Category();

newCategory.Description = "testing"; 

//

// C r u d

dataFacade.Create(sessionFacade, newCategory);

//

// c R u d 

// Read

Category category = dataFacade.Read(sessionFacade, newCategory.Id);

Assert.AreEqual<string>(category.Description, newCategory.Description); 

// PagedRead

IList<Category> categories = dataFacade.PagedRead(sessionFacade, 1500, 10);

Console.WriteLine("categories.Count: " + categories.Count); 

//

// c r U d

category.Description = String.Format("{0}-{1}", category.Description,DateTime.Now.ToLongTimeString()); 

dataFacade.Update(sessionFacade, category);

sessionFacade.Flush(); 

//

// c r u D

dataFacade.Delete(sessionFacade, category);

sessionFacade.Flush();

 

 

The code above was executed on 8 threads, each iterating over 16 session openings, each callings 64 times.

 

Now for some fun: I implemented a NHibernate and a SqlClient version of this facades, for example:

 

public void Create(ISessionFacade sessionFacade, Category category)

{

((SessionImplementation)sessionFacade).Session.Save(category);

} 

And the result was: NHibernate implementation was 15% faster! Isn't it great?

Ok, I must confess, the SqlClient code didn't use parameters, that's probatly why. Yet, an excelent result for NHibernate.

And yes, it's true, this doesn't prove NHibernation's scalability. But it's a start, and at least can be backed by real data.

One of these days I'll benchmark NetTiers and LINQ for SQL, and post the results back here. Cya there :)