ORM solutions (JPA; Hibernate) vs. JDBC

Question

I need to be able to insert/update objects at a consistent rate of at least 8000 objects every 5 seconds in an in-memory HSQL database.

I have done some comparison performance testing between Spring/Hibernate/JPA and pure JDBC. I have found a significant difference in performance using HSQL.. With Spring/Hib/JPA, I can insert 3000-4000 of my 1.5 KB objects (with a One-Many and a Many-Many relationship) in 5 seconds, while with direct JDBC calls I can insert 10,000-12,000 of those same objects.

I cannot figure out why there is such a huge discrepancy. I have tweaked the Spring/Hib/JPA settings a lot trying to get close in performance without luck. I want to use Spring/Hib/JPA for future purposes, expandability, and because the foreign key relationships (one-many and many-many) are difficult to maintain by hand; but the performance requirements seem to point towards using pure JDBC.

Any ideas of why there would be such a huge discrepancy?

Answer 1

We have similar experience comparing Hibernate with JDBC in batch mode (Statement#executeBatch()). Basically, it seems like Hibernate just doesn't do that well with bulk operations. In our case, the Hibernate implementation was fast enough on our production hardware.

What you may want to do, is to wrap your database calls in a DAO, giving your application a consistent way of accessing your data. Implement your DAOs with Hibernate where it's convenient, and with JDBC where the performance requirements call for it.