#android-orm-benchmark

##Hey!

Slides from my DroidconUK talk: https://docs.google.com/a/touchlab.co/presentation/d/1jZW-SKdlMmOZG2QrcnWNP7EPJj5bIunLXiHdUeVZq2U/edit?usp=sharing

This project was originally built to basically show how much faster GreenDAO is than ORMLite. The speed difference was mostly caused by putting a foreign collection on the ORMLite entity, and not on the GreenDAO entity, so ORMLite was WAY slower in measurements. As a general rule, benchmarks tend to show the result the author wants (sorry, benchmark person).

I was the original ORMLite Android adapter author (not the ORMLite author, which was WAY more work). Since I found this benchmark, I've been using it to demostrate relative speed of different ORMs. I've been using this one mostly toung in cheek. It was originally designed with a huge bias to show what was desired, so ha ha. I've tried to remove as much bias as possible, but if experts in the target ORMs understand them better, please update.

The benchmark only tests basic table marshalling. Testing foreign object fetching is tricky because different frameworks do it differently (or don't at all). However, if you understand which mechanism is used, you can pretty much extrapolate what the performance will be like.

In general, source-gen frameworks are 2x reflection frameworks. Ironically, considering the initial goal, GreenDAO is by far the slowest source gen (not including SquiDB, which is slower than some reflection frameworks).

Performance isn't everything, though. Whatever. Here's the original README. The numbers I ran were on Lollipop, which may explain why relfection vs source gen performance is much better now.

Currently tested frameworks

DBFlow

Cupboard

GreenDAO

ORMLite

Realm

SQLite

SQLite (optimized)

Squeaky

Squeaky (immutables)

SquiDB

SugarORM

Update

Got a pull request for an update to greed dao, and a request to refresh realm with a new version. Will work on getting that checked in and pushed to store asap.

Everything below this is from the original benchmark. Its probably old.

##Summary

ORM-Benchmark is an Android application built in Eclipse that benchmarks the following against each other:

The benchmark runs the following tasks:

CREATE_DB - Creation of database structure
WRITE_DATA - Writing 1000 'user' objects and 10000 'message' objects
READ_DATA - Read all 10000 'message' objects in the table
READ_INDEXED - Read an indexed field (the 5000th 'message' in the table)
READ_SEARCH - Query the first 100 rows that matches a search term (using LIKE)
DROP_DB - Drop database strucuture

Each task is run 5 times, and the application reports the average time for each in milliseconds.

##Sample Output

Building and running the ORM-Benchmark project produces output similar to that below.

The times are in milliseconds.
The results are shown on the device and are also logged to Logcat.

The results below combine the in-memory database results with the on disk database results side by side. They are from a Nexus 4 on 20th Dec 2013, and we've put an "M" in front of the tests for the in-memory results.

##Screenshots

After pressing "Run Benchmark" you can press "Show Results" to see the results:

##Technical Reference ###Customizing Benchmark Tests

Enable/disable the usage of in-memory SQLite databases. Check MainActivity#USE_IN_MEMORY_DB
Number of times to run the tests. Check MainActivity#NUM_ITERATIONS
Implementing your own BenchmarkExecutable you can add more tests.
Search term. Check BenchmarkExecutable#SEARCH_TERM
Search limit. Check BenchmarkExecutable#SEARCH_LIMIT
Number of users to be saved into the db. Check BenchmarkExecutable#NUM_USER_INSERTS
Number of messages to be saved into the db. Check BenchmarkExecutable#NUM_MESSAGE_INSERTS
Number of messages with readers. Check BenchmarkExecutable#NUM_MESSAGES_WITH_READERS
Number of reades on messages. Check BenchmarkExecutable#NUM_READERS

###Changing The GreenDao Tests

GreenDao requires a separate project to generate the source code for database entities and DAOs. The ORM-Benchmark-GreenDAO-Generator project is a Java application that you can run to regenerate the database definitions. You only need to do this if you want to change the GreenDao database model!