Performance-Comparisons between Type-3-Drivers

Type-3-Drivers claim that they make a JDBC-Datasource transparently available over network boundaries. But this only makes sense when the performance is sufficient for the usage scenarios. It can be dangerous to develop with a native JDBC driver and then switch to a Type-3-Driver only to recognize that the performance drops dramatically and renders the application unusable. VJDBC is highly optimized and configurable for these scenarios.

Besides VJDBC there are some more Type-3-Drivers, both commercial and free. For the comparison the products RmiJdbc (free) and Duality (shareware) were chosen.

No special performance tests were written. The Hibernate persistence framework has an extensive set of unit tests which test both functionality and performance. I simply used the Hibernate unit tests (v2.1.8) in combination with HSQL-DB 1.7.3 and measured each test with

• HSQL-DB Native-Driver
• VJDBC 1.2
• Duality (W1R044-01 A4, Trial Version)
• RmiJdbc 3.3

Below you see the results of these tests (15 tests) sorted descending by the time that the Native-Driver needed. Each column displays the factor which the Type-3-Driver needed to complete the test compared to the Native-Driver. As you can see the VJDBC performance is quite close to the Native-Driver while Duality and RmiJdbc perform 10 times worse than VJDBC in the longest running test.

All tests run locally to prevent side effects from networking. The compression feature of VJDBC was deactivated.

The Raw Numbers

Here the results of each test (values are in milliseconds). The longest running test FooBarTest didn't run with RmiJdbc because of an Out-Of-Memory-Exception after a long delay with 100% CPU usage.