Joana Roque (2013)

MSc Student

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MSc dissertation: A Study on the Performance of an Object/Relational Mapping Framework (in Portuguese)  
Period: September 2012 — September 2013
Grade: 16/20 points
Work context: Synergy-VM project (funded by the National Science Foundation, PI: Prof. João Lourenço) 

Abstract: Nowadays, there are various tools available to helping in the development of three- tier applications, relieving the software developers from the responsibility of defining the structure and the interactions with the database management system. However, the in- troduction of an additional software layer between the application and the database nec- essarily impose an overhead to the system’s overall performance. These systems make also use of multiple strategies to reduce the overhead they impose, by incorporating mul- tiple cache elements. The work reported in this thesis aims at making a study to understand the dimen- sion of the performance overheads introduced by the usage of object/relational map- ping tools in an three-tier architecture. For that it will be measured the performance of the benchmark TPC-W in two versions: a standard version, using a relational database; and other version, adapted from the previous one, that uses a object/relational mapping framework, supported with a relational database. The latter version will be also tested to verify how the inclusion of multiple caches supported by the ORM tool can improve the application’s performance. From the performance analysis of the two benchmark ver- sions, it is intended to quantify the performance losses resulting from the introduction of an additional layer between the database and the application, and as well identify where the performance losses arise and understand potential ways to mitigate them.

Keywords: Object/Relational Mapping, Three-tier Applications, Hibernate, Data Per- sistence Mechanisms