ORM performance in general

[Ryan Day]

We're reviewing Hibernate vs. raw JDBC for our application design. In the development organization as a whole, there is a discussion regarding the performance implications of using an ORM (e.g. "ORMs are too slow").

I searched the archive but didn't find a thread on this, but I imagine it has been discussed previously. Could someone point me to a JavaRanch thread on this topic, or suggest another web resource that has a discussion of both sides of this topic?

[Mark Spritzler]

Yes it has been talked about tons of times.

Anyway, ORM is a layer above JDBC. And ORMs like Hibernate has a decent sized learning curve. But, if you know the ORM tool and all of its features, there are times that with caching and all I can make a query run faster through Hibernate than through straight JDBC.

For the most part with lazy initialization and some basic design principles, the performance addition is negligible, and the ease of reading code, coding time, and decreased maintenance you save far far outweighs the minute performance degradation where found.

And remember this is my personal opinion of ORMs. And if I were to see a project that had JDBC code I would run far away from that company, personally.

Mark

Mark
[ March 27, 2008: Message edited by: Mark Spritzler ]