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I've written a server which interacts with an MSSQL database. It's currently written in .NET 4.0 and uses NHibernate as an ORM to retrieve information from the database. When reading about .NET 4.5 and the introduction of the async/await keywords I learned that, unfortunately, NHibernate does not have support for async/await .
I don't understand why issuing an async call to a database would be beneficial. Don't all the requests queue at the database level anyway? Wouldn't async just increase points of failure without improving anything?
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Asynchronous calls are most useful when facing relatively infrequent large, expensive operations that could tie up response threads which could otherwise be servicing requests while the originator waits. For quick, common operations, async can slow things down.
Access to a web resource sometimes is slow or delayed. If such an activity is blocked within a synchronous process, the entire application must wait. In an asynchronous process, the application can continue with other work that doesn't depend on the web resource until the potentially blocking task finishes.
Asynchronous programming is a technique that enables your program to start a potentially long-running task and still be able to be responsive to other events while that task runs, rather than having to wait until that task has finished. Once that task has finished, your program is presented with the result.
Asynchronous actions are best when your method is I/O, network-bound, or long-running and parallelizable. Another benefit of an asynchronous action is that it can be more easily canceled by the user than a synchronous request.
In general, the benefit is that you are not blocking the currently executing thread while a possibly expensive (asynchronous) operation is run. In the context of a WPF / Windows Form application, this mean you are not blocking the UI Thread (if the request is originating from that thread) and your application remains responsive.
In the context of a web application (say IIS), this mean you are releasing a thread in the pool while you are awaiting for the result. Since you are not locking the thread, it can be reused to accept another request and results in better performance in terms of accepted connections (not necessarily time / request).
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