db4o 55x Faster than Hibernate in OO7 Benchmark
Native Object Persistence Solution Eliminates Object-relational Mismatch
with Higher Performance in 19 of 20 Test Cases
SAN MATEO, Calif., Sep. 28, 2006 - db4objects, creator of the leading
open source object database for Java and .NET, today announced that
another independent benchmark has confirmed db4o's far superior
performance for object persistence compared to object-relational
mappers like Hibernate.
The ESPRESSO research group at the University
of Pretoria, South Africa, has ported the legacy OO7 benchmark from C++
to Java. The OO7 benchmark is the single most recognizable
object-oriented performance benchmark available and was introduced by a
team led by M.J. Carey in 1993 to measure the performance of complex
object persistence operations. The researchers benchmarked db4o, the
world's most popular object database, against Hibernate, the leading
object-relational mapper from Jboss/RedHat. Both technologies are open
source and available in Java and .NET.
The benchmark demonstrates a performance
differential of up to 55x when querying for complex objects. Out of the
predefined test runs, db4o offered significantly better performance
than Hibernate/PostgreSQL in 19 of 20 test cases. The new benchmark
confirmed the findings of the 2005 open source benchmark Pole Position
on Sourceforge which measures db4o performance up to 44x faster than
Hibernate.
The performance difference between db4o and
Hibernate results from Hibernate's object-relational mismatch, the
inherent incompatibility between object-oriented languages like Java
and .NET and relational databases such as Oracle and PostgreSQL. Adding
an object-relational mapper like Toplink or Hibernate is only a band
aid to ease working with the mismatch and seriously degrades
performance compared to a native solution like db4o. With "objects all
the way down", db4o is not only much easier to use, but also much
faster to run. Performance is among the prime concerns of most
developers, especially on resource-constrained devices such as mobile
phones, robots or cars.
"It was found that db4o's overall performance
was better than that of Hibernate," the researchers concluded. "Many of
the test results seem to confirm our rules of thumb (here, that the
overhead of object-relational translation causes ORM-based
implementations to be consistently slower than staying in object form
with an object database)." Specifically, "the general picture is that
db4o queries are fast and that Hibernate is competitive only in
isolated cases, where perhaps the performance of the relational
database part more than compensates for the object-relational
overhead."
Fiddler also invested in db4objects' round B
financing earlier this year. Besides the full participation of
incumbent investors, db4objects welcomed Vinod Khosla (founding CEO of
SUN Microsystems), Tim Howes (CTO of Opsware, inventor of the LDAP
protocol), and Tim O'Reilly (O'Reilly Media) as the company's newest
backers.
The full research results are documented in a paper, which is available on www.odbms.org, the research portal for education and research on object databases.
About db4objects, Inc
db4objects, Inc (www.db4o.com)
provides db4o, the only native object database for both Java and .NET,
available under open source and commercial licenses. 15,000 registered
community members and more than 600,000 downloads make db4o the world's
most popular object database. db4o is used by some of the world's most
innovative companies, including Boeing, BMW, Bosch, Seagate, and Intel.
db4objects is a privately held company based in San Mateo, California,
and backed by noted Silicon Valley luminaries including Mark Leslie,
founding CEO of Veritas, Jerry Fiddler, founding CEO of Wind River, and
Vinod Khosla, founding CEO of SUN Microsystems.